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Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

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Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#51
post #49

Firebase is revolutionary. If you haven't used it, it means you can remove your reliance on all the server side logic you currently maintain. It is a huge philosophical change but is the perfect complement to serverless architectures. This is smart by Google. AWS AppSync provides much of the same functionality but gives you the benefit (if you already know Graphql) of Graphql. Or, it forces you to learn about graphql…

I’ve found it’s only good vs your own stack for small prototypes and MVPs, and that the debt builds up faster than anything else I’ve ever used (the cost too!) but YMMV.

I use the analytics heavily though, the built in network reliability and performance analytics you get for 1 line have literally saved my company millions of dollars. Mentally it was hard to ditch direct GA but it’s really so great.

Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#52
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vernor Vinge has a character who comes out of cryo and discovers that code he wrote 500 years ago is still in production. It’s just under layers and layers of abstraction. He proceeds to pwn a bunch of hardware to aid a counter-conspiracy.

What book?? That sounds like an awesome read

I was thinking exactly the same thing!

Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#53
post #47

Firebase is the worst name ever. Literally it describes absolutely nothing. I really wish Google would take a look at naming.

Google acquired that company. And the name even has half the word "database" in it, which is much more descriptive than most tech names.

You know what else happened around Firebase?

I was a customer of Divshot, a "static web hosting service" that was merged into the Firebase team at Google, so it's not quite as clear as made out.

Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#54
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google acquired that company. And the name even has half the word "database" in it, which is much more descriptive than most tech names.

You know what else happened around Firebase? I was a customer of Divshot, a "static web hosting service" that was merged into the Firebase team at Google, so it's not quite as clear as made out.

My point was Google didn't name the product.

Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#55
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saas can get a product out fast. But yes, unless one has some kind of special contract with a Saas company ensuring the continuity of the service as long as one needs it, never rely on Saas for too long, unless the solution is open source. For all we know Firebase could be gone in 2/3 years...

This is why I really like now.sh. They've put a ton of effort into fitting the patterns already in use for self deployments, with only a tiny bit of overhead on that for env vars and domain configuration (~10 short lines of configs for one of my current projects).

Your post made me checkout now.sh which does look really cool, but it really is a poor example here.

* It's a SaaS with monthly fees.

* now itself doesn't support self-hosting (i.e. the `now` binary will always use the now.sh backend)

* Consequently, if now.sh closes down you can't continue to use it.

* When it comes to hosting the code you upload, it appears to require you to use a cloud hosting provider (Aws, Azure, etc). You can't point it to a box of your choosing.

Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#56
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Fire Upon the Deep

I think it's the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky. I thought A Fire Upon the Deep had even cooler concepts though.

Yeah, seems to be A Deepness in the Sky:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky#Interste...

Recently read A Fire Upon the Deep personally, and don't recall much/any mention of it there. :)

Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#57

Dammit not inbox. I've been using it since the beginning. You know this is the kind of stuff that prevents me from diving too deep into there tech and products. I love flutter but I'm scared about its fate. Flutter, Dart, Fuchsia these are some great technologies but they might end up in bin some day. In the end, I tell myself, I'm just a user. Imagine what must be the state of developers who spent years working on t…

These days, I dig for self hosted version for all my needs. It's an interesting task to find there are many interesting projects. I would build one if something is completely missing.

Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#58
post #49

Firebase is revolutionary. If you haven't used it, it means you can remove your reliance on all the server side logic you currently maintain. It is a huge philosophical change but is the perfect complement to serverless architectures. This is smart by Google. AWS AppSync provides much of the same functionality but gives you the benefit (if you already know Graphql) of Graphql. Or, it forces you to learn about graphql…

Have you seen the AWS Amplify CLI along with the new GraphQL transform and codegen features? It largely eliminates the "forces you to learn about graphql" downside that you mention. Here is more info: https://aws-amplify.github.io/amplify-js/media/api_guide#usi...

Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#59
post #49

Firebase is revolutionary. If you haven't used it, it means you can remove your reliance on all the server side logic you currently maintain. It is a huge philosophical change but is the perfect complement to serverless architectures. This is smart by Google. AWS AppSync provides much of the same functionality but gives you the benefit (if you already know Graphql) of Graphql. Or, it forces you to learn about graphql…

One additional feature of AppSync is that you're not tied to any particular database implementation, you can use any database (or data source for that matter, including existing REST APIs & Lambda functions).

Re: Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase

#60
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And is it really wrong to spend a couple of years becoming an expert Plan 9 user just because it doesn't take over the world? I still think it's all (mostly) time well spent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

it's hard to gauge opportunity cost, since architectures fade in and out of popularity and patterns succeed where the frameworks that introduced them fail. I doubt Rob Pike and Ken Thompson would give up the experience of writing Plan 9; its lessons persist in Go and other systems they've designed. Google's tech stack was pioneered by systems programmers who built their career writing for supercomputers, forced to ta…

>it's hard to gauge opportunity cost, since architectures fade in and out of popularity and patterns succeed where the frameworks that introduced them fail.

It might be hard but it's also necessary. That's true for many other things that are hard.

What would the opposite be?

Have people adopting any new technology and losing several years of their lives studying a doomed fad because without evaluating its long term potential and opportunity cost because it's "hard" and "architectures fade in and out of popularity"?

Instead, we should encourage people to do the hard thing, and evaluate things that they intend to study and their opportunity cost before they devote any substantial time with them.

Some will still get it wrong and invest in the wrong tech, but overall doing due diligence before jumping in will be better than just blindly going for whatever catches their fancy or is hyped.

>I doubt Rob Pike and Ken Thompson would give up the experience of writing Plan 9; its lessons persist in Go and other systems they've designed.

That was their job and they were paid for it. And Plan9 was also their own creation and original research.

That's not the same as some third party devoting themselves to a new technology just because it looks cool, it's hyped at the moment, etc.

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