🔥 Firebase Dev Summit 2017

What Google showed at the Firebase Dev Summit 2017 in Amsterdam, from Crashlytics and Predictions to Cloud Firestore.

By Dennis Bruijn · · 2 min read · #conference #firebase #google

Originally published on Medium.

Today I visited the Firebase Dev Summit in Amsterdam 🇳🇱 This summit showcased the latest product releases and features. We learned how Firebase helps to solve key infrastructure & growth challenges that the industry faces.

The Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ and Bimhuis venue on the Amsterdam waterfront

Huh, Firebase Dev Summit?

The Firebase Dev Summit is an annual event held by Google. Every year a country is selected to host the summit and the event is mostly based around Firebase.

Since Firebase isn’t just a real-time database anymore but a platform that helps developers build, analyze and grow there is a lot of awesome knowledge that could be shared.

What’s new in Firebase?

Basically, Google integrated Crashlytics into Firebase, enabled first-class A/B support and take their first step in bringing the power of Machine Learning 🤖 into Firebase with a new product called Predictions.

Predictions automatically create dynamic user groups based on predicted behaviour from your analytics, you can use these predictions i.e. to send users who are about to churn in the next 7 days a customised notification

Firebase Predictions illustration: players grouped by predicted behaviour, with those about to churn offered three extra lives

They are also working hard to prepare for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) across Firebase and they are committed to helping us (developers) succeed under it.

Talks, talks, talks!

I’ve tried to attend the talks that were most aligned with my day to day job as a front-end web developer. And to sum it up, the most exciting feature for me is…Cloud Firestore! 🎉

Cloud Firestore diagram of phones, tablets and laptops syncing a shared list through the cloud

A fully-managed NoSQL document database for mobile and web app development. It operates using documents and collections as a data model.

It allows for expressive queries. Queries scale with the size of your result set, not the size of your data set.

So you’ll get the same performance fetching 1 result from a set of 100, or 100,000,000

Firestore syncs data between devices, enables offline data access through an on-device database and they provide SDK’s for Node, Python, Go, and Java.

Firebase Dev Summit 2017 attendee badge next to a cup of coffee

I had an amazing day!

Did meet some new people, a couple I already knew, and some I used to work with in the past.

The food was delicious, the venue was perfect and it had all the features I think a conference needs to be able to offer their attendees.

Collage of the keynote stage at Firebase Dev Summit 2017 and slides about building and growing apps

Collage of speakers on stage, a code slide and the audience at Firebase Dev Summit

Collage of a talk building an app with Cloud Storage, Authentication and Cloud Firestore, including live coding

Collage of a fastlane talk asking “How would you like 2 extra hours every week?” next to a list of release-day excuses

Collage of a serverless talk showing an app with client SDKs talking directly to Cloud Firestore