I spent my evenings this weekend tinkering with the beta of a new service called Firebase, a Y-combinator company which is now trying to become the back-end infrastructure for real-time applications. I was attracted by the idea that one could whip together fast prototypes to test out ideas/MVPs.
Iām not (yet) very back-end savvy, so am still trying to digest their docs, but as a start I made a simple little website “Quote Inspiration” that allows anyone to post an inspirational quote and others will see it in real-time.
This was a fun toy project. Firebase made the data/real-time elements effortless, and I used this as an excuse to poke around Google web fonts, use Git Pages, practice responsive CSS design, and keep on working on my javascript and jquery skills.
It has also been amusing to see how people poke at it. The Internet is a giant social experiment. š
The Firebase tech is in beta (all the back-end data is insecure right now), and of course there is the issue that if you do everything on the front-end, your code is totally exposed to the client even if minimized, but Firebase is definitely a company I am going to keep an eye on especially for fast prototyping and initial idea validation.