Feature request (or rather wish): React / Firebase

First things first: I’m really happy that you now have a tutorial about Hooks in your React course. I was a bit disappointed that I had to learn it somewhere else (big thanks to Codevolution).

My suggestion now is: Add a Firebase tutorial to the React course. Why? I’m an absolute beginner with React and I was missing a real success moment at the end of the ‘old’ course.

While I learned about Hooks somewhere else, I also learned about Googles Firebase while creating an Instagram clone. And it gave me that moment of success you and I need at the beginning of a journey.
I know that using Firebase as some disadvantages, mainly that you heavily depend on Google. But it has some pros to take into consideration like:

  • The basic version is free of charge. This is nice for small projects.
  • Simple implementation of different types of authentication (e.g. email / password, social login)
  • Easy to use data base. And it is easy to learn to deal with a real time db.
  • Really nice way to learn how to secure your app and how to deal with rules based access.
  • Fast publishing of the own app.
  • And if your app idea is worth a billion, Firebase scales up as you need it.

Later on it absolutely makes sense to learn to code all of that on you own (express, sql db, routes, api access, axios etc. ). But for a “cotton candy cloud good feel” start with the first app Firebase is a way to go.

Hey @uranwolle, thanks for this. I’m welcoming of feedback in general, but feedback this well-constructed makes it easy to consider. :slight_smile: I’ve passed it along to our curriculum team members. :+1:

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Hey @uranwolle! Lead author on the React updates here. Thanks for the feedback! I totally agree that the “cotton candy cloud good feel” is valuable and nice to have as early as possible :innocent:

It sounds like you’re looking to build a React app that includes…

  • authentication/access control
  • database
  • security
    …and Firebase happens to cover all of those features.

We don’t cover Firebase, but we do have content to make something equivalent. The soon-to-be released Full-Stack Career Path will have you building apps with all of this. It will replace the current Web Development Career Path.

Until that release, the Ravenous and Jammming projects in the Web Dev Career Path are good practice for React. They work with external APIs, which touches on a few of the concepts you’re interested in.

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Hey @alyssavigil and @nduckwiler

Thank you for your quick reply and you feedback. It is right that you already have covered these topics with the Ravenous and Jamming projects. These both projects are already very good to learn important topics like authentication, accessing a public API, accessing a data base, processing the response and so on. I have no intention to suggest a replacement. But for me as a beginner it was very difficult to deal with both of these projects and I had to learn it elsewhere to fully understand the covered topic. This is no critic since I know that I’m a rather slow learner.

But I dare to say that I’m not alone with it and maybe you put it on your bucket list for the bucket list. Working with Firebase and also AWS Amplify gives you a quick success feeling. The syntax is relatively simple but it covers all topics that I mentioned in my first post.
I also think that both solutions take away a lot of pain from the development of apps (authentication and data base access will never be fun) and will therefor become more and more important and popular. But this is just my personal opinion / feeling.

Again, thank you for you feedback and that you took the time for the replies.

I’m looking forward to your Full-Stack Career Path! :partying_face: