The "Zero to One" Magic

I began my developer journey back when I was 15, playing with C++ / C# and making simple games in Construct, this lasted for years with high school projects on top it was enough to satisfy my curiosity for the time, before I finished high school I started working on what I considered my first "real project" - it was C# based desktop app for crypto esports betting.

This was also my first "oh shit" experience realizing the complexity of building such project alone (even my first integration with MySQL was a huge pain!), but with lot of time on my hands, and no knowledge of what it means to build production level apps, I went full speed ahead, built prototype that "worked" in about 6 months and died 6 months later.

After finishing high school and failing my first project miserably, I started looking for my first job. Used to be a huge fan of Apple's ecosystem so naturally I decided to go with iOS.

Looked for "iOS courses" on udemy. purchased one for $13, and dove right in. This was my first experience with Firebase.

It was also my very first introduction to real-world software engineering, where "it works" is no longer enough, but we care that it works well and is easy to maintain.

This is exactly where Firebase changed my world view, at the same time you had all this new complexity of dealing with brand new database technology (realtime database, and later Firestore), but also OAuth, managing files through Storage or even integration with Google Analytics that seemed like nightmare at the time to inexperienced me.

However, the more I worked with Firebase and more I learned about it, the more amazed I was at what used to take me days now takes me an hour or two while heavily relying on both documentation & stack overflow. That's when I knew, this is something big.

Transition to Web

After playing with iOS for about 3 months, I did decide to apply for my first real job to local iOS dev shop. They were impressed by my enthusiasm, didn't care much for my lack of experience and offered me a junior position. However, at the same time I was applying for secondary "safety net" job at a call center, that unfortunately offered me more money, and imposter syndrome got the best of me and I took more money over the job I would really love doing and subsequently delayed my career as a developer by about 5 years.

During this time however, as I transitioned between many business roles (call center agent, project manager, technology transformation, product owner, finance manager), I never left development alone and started working with React and my beloved Firebase. The transition was as smooth as one can imagine, once I got familiar with React being able to build applications without having to manage dedicated backend and complicated authorization logic worked extremely well, and while having a full time job I was regularly shipping new side project every few months.

I attempted to commercialize some of them, but the only thing I got from it was tons of experience. When I started working for a fintech company back in 2021 as a product owner in Finance, I had the opportunity to start building something that helps the business and used Firebase to build a tax reconciliation platform with Firebase functions instead of dedicated API to connect with Power Automate worker that was performing the process of filling out the forms in proprietary GUI. The application was huge success and has seen significant adoption across the company, further showing me the potential of one developer + Firebase.

Here comes Next.js

One developer + Firebase dream was very quickly shattered. Late 2022 when I saw NextJS 13 for the first time I immediately fell in love, it felt powerful, like I could do anything I truly wanted, promise of performance that I just started seeing lacking with plain client side React, SSR and ISR that were just extremely simple, and lot of optimization built in.

Naturally, my first thought was how can I use NextJS with Firebase, the struggle of being used to working strictly with client side logic, and using Functions as a way to react to events didn't help, once again in my career I struggled. As the framework was getting more & more popular some open source projects by the Firebase team came out covering various implementations, but they never worked out of the box, which is exactly what Firebase was handing in to me in all previous experiences.

After while of struggling, I did decide to move away from Firebase, occasionally revisiting it with Vite projects but sticking to Vercel (deployment), NextJS + Postgres and NextAuth as my primary stack.

As popularity of meta frameworks grew, I did see Firebase introducing App Hosting, and I was there the first day to try it out, but once again it didn't hit the mark, custom docker setup, or even their example project didn't work immediately, and in between managing full time developer job and side projects, I couldn't afford to spend weeks on getting everything to work so I paused my pursuit of Firebase again.

Reintroduction in 2025

I spent the past 2.5 years designing a suite of applications at AT&T for their MVNO business, heavily relying on NextJS & Go lang, tried various flavors of NextJS based stacks as in those 2.5 years with my teammates we delivered 6 new products to their software lineup all based on NextJS (some internal, some customer focused). Around August I started looking around, and did decide to shoot my shot joining Google, after 2 months in the process (hands down best hiring experience I've seen), I finally landed the job as hybrid Android & Go lang developer.

Here is why it's cool: I've been working with Google stack for all my personal projects since I started being interested in software development and being able to become part of delivering the products I love & following a mission I strongly believe in is absolutely the best outcome. While I never really did Android before (outside of just general exploration) it gives me opportunity to shift my side projects back to mobile which I really loved on iOS.

Finally it gives me the chance to return to Firebase which is absolutely perfect for Android.

With the newly found enthusiasm for Firebase I started working on my first cross platform application. As I need to dive deeper into Android to prepare for the new role, it presented perfect opportunity to build another side project with Firebase, plugging in my experience developing for web.

My 2025 Experience

When starting my new side project I naturally started outlining it with what I already knew well which is the web. I built the web app, but instead of relying on Firestore rules exclusively for my authorization I did in fact just lock it down and use service account with my NextJS app instead. I still leveraged Firebase authentication, following documentation on integrating with own server and this time it felt right again. It was just like working with any other database, pure server side interaction. I was still able to leverage the amazing developer tooling like emulators, I was able to setup authentication providers with lot less code and shorter worry list, and be ready with prototype even sooner.

I still had one worry and that was deployment. I remembered back to my bad experience but I gave it another shot, and I can confidently say it's now back to it's seamless "Firebase-like" experience. Behind the scenes this deploys almost exactly the same setup that I would deploy on GCP, with Cloud Run, Global LB and CDN, but here is the kicker, it's less work for you as a developer on infrastructure, more time focusing on the product you are building.

It also comes with a hidden benefit by saving you $25 a month that you would pay purely for the global load balancer setup with zero traffic.

I remember when I rejoined AT&T in 2023, I went to my former boss and I was talking to him about how Firebase could make huge difference for people interested in becoming software engineers and specific argument I used it the affordability to start.

Many people used to learn Firebase as they didn't have to pay for any infrastructure, for many apps up to 1000+ DAUs. This makes incredible difference in low income countries. If you add your other costs on top, like Vercel hosting for $20 (assuming you have traffic), Supabase ($25) or something like MongoDB Flex (~$8) - for many this is huge!

I'm now in love with Firebase again.

Migrating behindthe.dev

I built my blog just several months before getting my eyes opened by how fantastic Firebase really is again.

Several hours later I was able to migrate my entire blog to run off Firebase:

• Firestore (used to be MongoDB)
• Firebase Auth (Google SSO used to be NextAuth)
• Firebase Storage (used to be GCP storage)
• deploy it to Firebase App Hosting with "free" CDN (used Vercel + Cloudflare before).

This heavily streamlined my stack and I strongly believe long term will give me more flexibility to focus on the content more over the technology that runs it.

I'm sure my journey isn't mine alone but many developers took similar route, the point of this is to say, Firebase grew as we weren't looking, and while I'm not trying to convince anyone to migrate to it, I'm saying give it a shot again. Just like gaming was more fun when we were younger, I feel like Firebase has reintroduced that joy of web dev again for me.

Side note: I'll do my best to post here weekly, want to continue to write about DSA and specifically focus on what helped me learn it in relatively short time (never studied computer science) - as well as my new experiences with Android, and deep dives on NextJS :)