Experience of Building on Firebase after ~ 2yrs

Experience of Building on Firebase after ~ 2yrs

Tags
Published
Author
Less Innovation
Hey. I used Firebase a lot at Spext. We were a small team, our focus was speed so we made heavy use of Firebase. It is a fully-managed service with a decent free-tier. Its easy to start, docs are simple. You feel lot of power.
 

Major Cons of Using Firebase

  • You do not learn system design
  • best practices around API design
  • Database design
  • industry practices
  • Auth system
 
Basically, since everything is neatly abstracted away, you don’t scratch below the surface. In short you do not learn. Building a product using firebase feels like plumbing, you have things readily available and have to arrange them together.
I think its good to start with, but once you have a running system, one should dig deeper to find/replace the system with rough edges.
I also think since most of the code resides on frontend, things do not recycle or reused.
I have seen myself writing same auth code for 5th time.