The entire Firebase team was at AngelHack (silicon valley edition), hosted at the PayPal headquarters (a wonderful venue) in San Jose last weekend, and we had a blast! The event was well attended - we had printed over 400 beta invites and ran out in only an hour (we emailed codes to those who needed them later through the day). The morning of the first day was mostly used to let people recruit participants, organize teams and their ideas. We also had presentations by each of the sponsors (including Firebase), highlighting what they offered and how they could help everyone build their hacks.
We setup our (nice looking, I might add) booth and had some of the crew head out and offer help to all the teams, who were just getting started with some early ideas and designs. Later in the evening, we conducted a breakout session to answer questions and help everyone who had decided to use Firebase for their hack. Andrew Lee, our co-founder, stayed at the venue overnight to continue helping!
There were 85 hacks submitted to hackathon.io (a platform for organizing great hackathons, powered by Firebase!) at the end of the 2-day event. After all the teams got a chance to present, 4 were picked as finalists to go on to the next round, including Rohan Pai who built an amazing tool called FireMap that uses Firebase to generate real-time heatmaps for any website so you can observe your user's behavior. Congratulations Rohan!
Of the 85 submissions, 57 teams used one or more APIs to help build their hack. We're very proud that 25 teams ended up using Firebase to power some aspect of their hack, making us the #1 API used at the hackathon! As a token of our appreciation, every team that used Firebase received a fun lego set, and the top two teams both got an iPad mini each.
The first iPad went to the Reboxed team (along with a glamorous trophy), who built a very useful hack that lets you re-purpose your old phone to act as a sensor, so that you can, for example, attach a smoke detector and setup an alert that will send you an SMS or an email.
The second iPad went to the LevelUp team, who made a great a fitness app that acts as your personal trainer, suggesting exercises and motivating you to do more of them!
Filepicker.io, KeenIO, and Singly were some of the other popular APIs being used by the hackathon participants. API providers are certainly gaining wider adoption amongst the developer community, especially at a hackathon, where using something like Firebase lets you focus on what's really important - your product - instead of having to worry about the not-so-easy task of building a back-end to power it.
We had a great time, and are already looking forward to our next event!
Last week we traveled up to Portland for the second annual RealtimeConf!
We attended in 2011 and it was one of the best conferences of the year. At the time we were still operating under our codename, Plankton. (The story of buying Firebase.com is one for another blog post).
There were a number of frameworks and products that were pre-launch or very young last year. Talking to the authors about their hopes and goals was inspiring. It has been fascinating to see how each of them have evolved in the past 12 months, so, as you can imagine, we were keen to go back to Portland and see everyone in person.
Firebase itself has come a long way. In the past year we've solidified our direction, launched in private beta, raised a round offunding and talked to more users than we can count.
This year's RealtimeConf didn't disappoint. The &yet team, who organized, kicked off the conference by guiding the attendees to the venue behind a marching band.
Other highlights included a real-time merit badge, a personalized stamp (yes, the library-book variety) of your twitter handle, and an empty passport for collecting said stamps. It was all pretty epic.
We returned this year as speakers also. Michael gave a 10 minute lighting talk that gave an overview of Firebase.
He gave a high level overview of our core-concepts,
talked about common use-cases, and showed off some examples in the Graphical Debugger.
We had an excellent time seeing old faces and meeting new ones. A big thanks to Adam and the &yet team, we'll be back again next year and hopefully we'll see you there too!
On Monday we had our first Firebase Drink Up. We've been knee-deep in code since our beta launch in April and we hadn't seen many of our users in-person for a long time.
We decided to fix that.
WeWork labs kindly let us use their space on 2nd Street in SOMA, just a few blocks from our office. It's a gorgeous venue with hardwood floors, pool, foosball and a great vibe. Around 200 Firebase users, friends and startup folks came.
It was also a great chance to meet Rob and Greg, the newest additions to the team!
Vikrum, in-between serving drinks and (new!) Firebase t-shirts, took some great pictures:
Ankur, Janine, and Song from TokBox getting their name-tag on.
Anmol and Jeff chat as people start to trickle in.
Things started to get going; Ivan was having a blast!
We projected a Firebase-powered game of Tetris on the wall, along with the Graphical Debugger so you could see the data changing in real-time.
Everyone had a great time and we wouldn't be where we are without the support of our users, friends, and the startup community in SF. A special thanks to Kaitlin, Seth and Dave at WeWork Labs.
Stay tuned for next time!
Today we're pleased to announce that Firebase databases now support SSL. This is the first of many steps we will be taking in the coming months to make Firebase the most secure way to build your cloud application.
This means that both the Firebase JS include and the packets that are transmitted between the Firebase server and your users' browsers will be encrypted.
For developers who are new to Firebase, please see our updated documentation. For developers who have used Firebase previously, you'll need to change two things:
1. Your Firebase JS Include
You should alter the script tag in your page
https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/2.4.2/firebase.js
Concretely this will look like:
<script src="https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/2.4.2/firebase.js"></script>
2. Your Firebase URL References
Each piece of data inside Firebase has its own URL -- that is one of our core concepts. To use SSL for sending and receiving data from your clients, these URLs will need to be altered to use 'https', for example:
https://SampleChat.firebaseIO.com/
var myRootRef = new Firebase("https://SampleChat.firebaseIO.com/");
We understand that SSL is just the beginnings of a comprehensive security system. We'll be making many more announcements over the coming months relating to security. Stay tuned!
Yesterday I gave a talk at the O'Reilly Fluent conference in San Francisco outlining some ways of building multiplayer games using a synchronization service as the backend.
The slides are below. The source code for the examples is on GitHub. Enjoy!
Make your-game-multiplayer
View more PowerPoint from Andrew Lee
