A couple of weeks ago, I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon studying Firebase docs. Got interested enough to start playing with some code. Ended up writing a couple of Firebase (cloud) functions to fetch and serve data to two of my apps. In the process learnt to use Firebase functions and Firestore database. Next day, I went back, cleaned up the code a bit, and moved one of my subdomains to Firebase hosting to make the API endpoints look clean and tidy. It’s been running smooth and tidy ever since.

In half a day, I created a robust, scalable, and free (at current scale) backend to provide data to two of my apps while massively reducing load on the real data server. The requests to real server went from a few thousand to about 200 a day. Despite increasing the front-end fetch frequency to nearly 3x the previous value.

I really enjoyed learning, developing, and deploying this solution. So much so that I’m now itching to move other backend stuff to firebase, sometimes even when it doesn’t need to be :D