Hey there, Firebase developers!
Well, Cloud Next 2019 is upon us, and if you happen to be one of the several thousand people descending upon Moscone Center this year and want to get your fill of Firebase knowledge, you're in luck! There are a bunch of great sessions the Firebase team is putting on throughout the conference. And if you want to talk to any of us in person, swing on by the App Dev zone in the expo area. We'll be at the Firebase booth from now until Thursday the 11th.
But if you're not able to make it to beautiful downtown San Francisco this year, never fear! You can still find out everything that's new with Firebase in this blog post, so read on!
For those of you who are Google Cloud Platform customers, we are pleased to announce that the GCP support plan now includes support for Firebase products. This means that if you are using any of the paid GCP support packages, you can get the same high-quality support that you've come to expect from GCP for Firebase products as well. This includes target response times as quick as 15 minutes, technical account management (for enterprise customers), phone support, and much more.
Now if you're not a paying GCP customer, don't worry -- free community support isn't going anywhere. But for many of our larger customers who were interested in a more robust paid support experience, this new option is welcome news. To find out more, you can check out the support pages on the GCP site as well as the Firebase Support Guide.
One of the new GCP products that we announced at this year's Cloud Next is Cloud Run, a fully managed compute platform that lets you run stateless containers which you can invoke via HTTP requests. And we're happy to announce that you can use Cloud Run in conjunction with Firebase Hosting.
Why do you care? Because Firebase Hosting isn't just good for hosting static sites. You can run microservices on top of Hosting as well. In the past, you did this by connecting your Hosting site with Cloud Functions for Firebase, which meant that you had to write all of your code in Node.js. But now that you can deploy stateless servers through Cloud Run and have Hosting talk to them, you can build your microservices in anything from Python to Ruby to Swift.
This is a pretty deep topic which deserves its own blog post, so keep an eye out for that in the next couple of days. Or check out the documentation if you want to get started today.
In the past, you could filter your event reports in Google Analytics for Firebase by a single user property (or audience). So you could quickly answer questions like how many iOS 12 users were signing up for your newsletter. But up until now, you couldn't filter by more than one different user property at once. So if you wanted to find out how many iOS 12 users on iPad Pros were signing up for your newsletter, that wasn't really possible.
Well, we're happy to announce that you'll be able to filter your Analytics event reports by any number of different user properties or audiences -- both ones defined by Firebase as well as custom user properties -- at the same time. So if you want to find out how many iOS 12 users with iPad Pros who prefer dogs over cats signed up for your newsletter, that's now something you can see directly within the Firebase console.
This change is currently rolled out to a small number of users, and will be available to everybody over the next few weeks. This will apply automatically to all of your data going back to December of 2018 when it becomes available, so hop on over to the Firebase console and give it a try!
About 9 months ago ago, we gave developers the ability to create nicer looking domains for their Dynamic Links. So instead of having Dynamic Links with domains that looked like a8bc7w.app.goo.gl, you could set them to something much nicer, like example.page.link.
a8bc7w.app.goo.gl
example.page.link
We improved upon this feature to give you the ability to create dynamic links with any custom domain you own. So if you want to create a link with a domain like www.example.com, this is now something you can do with Dynamic Links.
www.example.com
The one caveat here is that your site needs to be hosted using Firebase Hosting. If migrating your primary domain over to Firebase Hosting isn't feasible, you can easily setup a subdomain of your site instead. For instance, maybe you can't move all of www.example.com to Firebase Hosting, but you could pretty easily set up links.example.com on Firebase Hosting, and use that for your Dynamic Links moving forward.
links.example.com
To find out more about custom domains in Dynamic Links and to get started, make sure to check out the documentation.
Of course, we're always rolling out new features and improvements to the Firebase platform, and with I/O happening just next month, maybe we'll have something more to talk about in May 😉. There's only one way to find out: Attend I/O in person, or keep reading the Firebase blog! (Okay, that's two ways. Counting was never a strong suit of mine.)
You have questions about Firebase, and the Firebase community has answers!
But do you know the best place to get your questions answered?
It can be kind of overwhelming to figure out which destination is the best for your particular question. What I'd like to explore today are your options, and how to choose the best one. Choosing the best (and knowing how best to ask) could give you a huge advantage in getting the answers you need. There are five leading options, each with a different purpose. Let's explore those options!
It might seems silly to say, but I think your question should start with a Google search. A well-constructed search could surface existing answers in some of the forums I'll discuss next. You can't pass up the chance of getting your question answered immediately because someone else asked it first!
Try entering your question directly into the search box. Or, if you have an error message in your code, try copying it in there. For exact error messages, sometimes it's helpful to put your search string in quotes to force the most relevant matches to the top of the results.
Bear in mind that not every search yields good results. In some cases, you might stumble across something so rare that only one other person has ever seen it!
That time I searched for "ERROR: Walrus not found: have you checked the polar ice caps?"
If a search doesn't give what you're looking for, it's time to choose from some other options.
But before we continue - if you end up deciding that your question is appropriate for multiple forums, be sure to state that you've cross-posted your question. That gives everyone a chance to figure out which forum may be the best options, and if the question has already been answered elsewhere. That saves everyone time.
Stack Overflow is great for programming questions. In fact, that's the only kind of question you're supposed to ask there. Many Firebase team members pay attention there, including members of the greater community. There are a few tips to making the best of your question on SO:
Not all questions are good for Stack Overflow. In particular, your question may be closed by the community if it's any of the following:
If your question is closed by the community, it will almost certainly not be answered. But don't worry: for questions about Firebase that don't follow the Stack Overflow requirements, there are other options!
Quora is great for general questions, especially those seeking recommendations and opinions. There doesn't have to be a "correct" answer to a question on Quora. It's OK to ask broad questions.
If you choose Quora, be sure to tag your question with the Firebase topic so it's more likely to get noticed by people who have experience with Firebase.
firebase-talk is a long-standing mailing list for people who are looking for open-ended discussion about all things Firebase. It's great for open-ended discussions that require a lot of text that goes back and forth between group members. Many Firebase team members scan the messages here.
When you post your first message here, be prepared to wait for some time for a moderator to accept it.
The Firebase Slack is where Firebase enthusiasts gather to talk about, well, Firebase! This is good for general chit-chat and gathering opinions. While some Firebase team members check in from time to time, it's not an official support channel. So if you have a question that better fits Stack Overflow or Quora, I think it's better to ask there first.
One notable exception is the Firebase Test Lab team who use the #test-lab channel for direct support.
Here's a couple tips for using the Firebase Slack effectively:
This is a good place to ask for urgent issues such as problems with your production app. It's also good for troubleshooting if you require some back and forth with a real person with a problem that can be reproduced in code. You can expect a response from support within 24 hours of asking your question.
Firebase support also handles bug reports and feature requests. So if you have one of those, please fill out the form in that link.
If you want a timely response, I would avoid the following destinations for general questions:
The other reason I would avoid these is because they have limited visibility to the world, whereas the destinations above are well known by the Firebase community. You probably want your question to reach the maximum number of people as possible, in order to get answered quickly.
However, we do encourage you to use Twitter and other social media to broadcast the questions you ask on other sites. For example, it's good to ask a question on Stack Overflow or Quora, then tweet the URL of the question with the hashtag #AskFirebase. Your questions may get picked up for use on the Firebase channel on YouTube.
The Firebase community loves to help with Firebase! And it's easier to get help if you follow the guidelines here to make sure your questions reach the correct audience.
Now watch this video with Kato Richardson, who loves our Firebase community!
