In this edition: Cloud Firestore, Flutter, search with Algolia, Phone Auth, and the brand new ML Kit!
Hey there, Firebase developers! The weather is really starting to warm up here in California as we approach summer, and if you're like me, it's the perfect time of year to go outside, find a nice shady tree, and cozy up with a programming project.
Ok, maybe some of you prefer going to the beach when it's nice out, but I can't seem to figure out how to keep the sand out of my computer! Anyway, when I'm feeling inspired to start a new project, I love having a tutorial to help out. Luckily, the Firebase community is creating new material all the time to keep me busy! If you're looking to find out more about a Firebase product, there's a good chance someone has tried it out and shared their experiences in a blog or video.
Since content can be scattered all over, I figured I'd do the work of scouring the Internet to bring you some of the best Firebase tutorials released over the past couple months. While I'd love to highlight every article and video about Firebase, there simply isn't time or space for them all, so I'm going to showcase a few that I'm most excited about.
Author: The Net Ninja
In this series, Shaun walks you step by step through incorporating Cloud Firestore into a simple web app. He starts with an intro to Cloud Firestore, and continues on through reading data, creating queries, writing data, and real-time updates. The illustrations really helped me visualize the content. The videos also include links to the code on GitHub.
Author: Tensor Programming
As the title suggests, this tutorial shows developers how to get users logged into your Flutter app with Firebase Authentication. This video picks up in the middle of a series, so you may want to go back to the beginning to learn about incorporating Cloud Firestore with Flutter. I've never worked with Dart before, but the instructor does such a great job of explaining each step, it was still very easy to follow along!
Author: Angular Firebase
The Angular Firebase channel creates a myriad of rich tutorials that use different features of Firebase. I'm highlighting this one in particular because so many developers want to know how to implement full text search in Firestore. I also like the use of Cloud Functions, especially the demonstration on how to hide secret API keys in environment variables. Even if you don't use Angular, you'll still learn a lot from this video. If you do use Angular, even better!
Don't want to choose between written and video tutorials?! Check out this Firebase Phone Authentication tutorial from Belal Khan, that also includes a video of the content. Khan's writing style includes larger blocks of code with explanations in between rather than adding and explaining line-by-line. This is great for those of you who like to learn by examining the code as a whole. I know when I'm learning a new feature, I like to look at a complete sample to see how the pieces fit together, so this was really cool to me.
Author: Anže Kravanja
I love this tutorial because, quite frankly, I know little about Google Analytics and nothing about Big Query. This is a great resource for developers who want to get more out of their data stored in Google Analytics for Firebase. The tutorial explains how sessions are tracked in Google Analytics for Firebase and demonstrates step by step how to group Firebase events into user sessions.
Adam Talcott looks at a couple of fun and useful cases for ML Kit for Firebase. As a fellow Swift developer, I love to see how other iOS folks are using Firebase.
I hope that these resources inspire you to build something great! I know after checking them out, I'm ready to slather on the sunblock and enjoy some UV rays while I code my next Firebase project!
Thanks to all of the developers who shared their knowledge with us through their tutorials! Firebase wouldn't be what it is without you. I'm going to feature tutorials here every couple of months, so when you find a tutorial you love, be sure to tell me about it! Find me on Twitter at @ThatJenPerson.
