AiA 229: Deploying to Firebase with CircleCI with Andrew Evans

Sponsors

• Sentry– use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
• Triplebyte - offers a $1000 signing bonus

Panel

• Alyssa Nicoll
• Joe Eames
• Charles Wood

Special Guest – Andrew Evans

Episode Summary

Charles Wood, Alyssa Nicholl, and Joe Eames discuss guest speaker, Andrew Evans’s article on “How to Deploy to Firebase”.  The article discusses how Continuous Integration and Delivery (CircleCI) and Firebase serve as alternatives to older pipeline technologies such as Jenkins and AWS. Andrew Evans talks about the versatility of Firebase CLI utility and its use as a platform for younger developers with little experience on CI/CD or any type of cloud deployment. It took Andrew a year to get proficient in Jenkins whereas with CircleCI he had a much easier learning curve. Andrew then mentions another article he wrote entitled “How the AngularFire Library makes Firebase feel like Magic”.

They also discuss whether CircleCI matches up to Jenkins on a larger scale workflow deployment. Andrew gives the example of a weather app named “Goose Weather” he is working on that uses “NgRx” that has a more robust workflow. He mentions that initially he was working on it for a CapitalOne blog but then took it up as a side project and started working on it by himself. They decide that even though Jenkins owns the market on large scale workflows, CircleCI’s ease of use is a very strong feature. Andrew also mentions that although he didn’t have a chance to test CircleCI on a high-level enterprise project, he feels that it would be a good experience. They also briefly compare the Jenkins and CircleCI on ease of rollbacks and license fees.

Shai shares his own experience of how he also really likes Netlify because it automates the commit process like CircleCI. They briefly touch on DevOps.

Andrew shares his own experience using CircleCI to do deployments to AWS. He feels the documentation and the blogs really help with the learning process. Andrew explains the meaning of:

• EWS: Elastic Container Service
• ALB: Application Load Balancer
• ELB: Elastic Load Balancer”

The panelists jokingly wonder whether Andrew should give them 50% of his profits from the weather app Goose Weather because he basically outed himself to CapitalOne on the show by revealing he was working on it on the side.     

Links

• Deploying to Firebase with CircleCI
• https://blog.angularindepth.com/how-the-angular-fire-library-makes-firebase-feel-like-magic-1fda375966bb
• https://goose-weather.firebaseapp.com/weather
• https://github.com/andrewevans02
• https://twitter.com/AndrewEvans0102
• https://rhythmandbinary.com/
• https://medium.com/@andrew_evans
• AIA-099-firebase-and-angularfire2-with-david-east-and-jeff-cross/

Picks

Shai Resnick:

• http://exploringjs.com
• https://youtu.be/gwlevtaC-u0

Joe Eames:

• Movie: Alita: Battle Angel
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7pYhpJaJW8

Charles Wood:

• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawandi
• The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
• https://www.2000books.com/-by-Mani-Vaya

Andrew Evans:

• Artemis by Andy Weir
• https://www.traversymedia.com/