CommentComment

Just the other day, someone on Twitter/X mentioned that it seems like the Firebase Apple SDK doesn't support the Codable protocol for Cloud Functions. I was a bit surprised to read this, as I've been using Codable in all of my apps when calling Cloud Functions. After looking at the code, and digging around in the GitHub issue tracker (Issue #8528 and PR #8854), I was able to confirm that we do support Codable when calling Cloud Functions. Here is a slide from a recent presentation I gave that shows how to use it.

If you ever have the impression something is missing in one of the Firebase SDKs, here is what you can do:

  1. Read the source code. All of our SDKs are open source, and digging around in the source code (including the tests) will tell you how things work. The source code is the ultimate source of truth.
  2. Ask in the GitHub discussions forums. The engineering teams monitor these on a daily basis, and other Firebase users contribute answers as well.
  3. Raise a feature request via the issue tracker. BTW, a discussion on the forums can later be turned into an issue, so it's always good to start there first.
  4. Ask on StackOverflow.
  5. Ask on Twitter/X, Threads, Mastodon, and feel free to tag me. I'm pretty busy these days, so it might sometimes take a while until I find time to respond (and sometimes I need to do research first), so the other options might get you answers quicker.

Oh, and just like most other open source frameworks, we love contributions, so if it turns out the feature you're looking for is actually missing, and you would like to contribute - tell us! There are a bunch of amazing features that were contributed by members of the community, and the majority of them started as a FR, and were a close collaboration of one or more community members with the Firebase team.

Peter  

FirebaseFirebase

SwiftUISwiftUI

Vision Pro / visionOS

Real-life use cases for VisionPro

Here are two real-world use cases for VisionPro that look pretty compelling:

These feel a lot more useful to me than placing little windows with kitchen timers around me.

Peter Friese  

How stuff works

AI and ML

Productivity

Business


Design

Conferences

Make It So: Building a Productivity App with SwiftUI and Firebase

I am super excited to run a hands-on workshop about SwiftUI and Firebase at Swift Heroes 2024 on April 17th (that's on the day before the main conference).

As a subscriber of my newsletter, you have the unique opportunity to win one of two free tickets to this half-day workshop.

For a chance to win, here's what you need to do:

  1. Like and re-post this tweet.
  2. Reply to this email, and tell me which part of the workshop you are most excited about (please include your Twitter handle), and what you hope to get out of the workshop.

I will randomly select two lucky winners on April 1st, and will notify them by email.

Please keep in mind this is a hands-on, in-person workshop - so to be fair to all other readers of the newsletter, please only take part if you can actually travel to Turin and take part in the workshop on April 17th, 2024.

If you don't want to test your luck, you can always book a seat using the tickets button on the conference web site - but don't hesitate too much: there's only 20 seats in total!

I look forward to seeing many of you there!