LAURENCE MORONEY: Welcome to Coffee with a Googler.
Today I'm going to be chatting with Shanea King-Roberson,
and we're going to be taking a look at this new course called
Firebase in a Weekend.
It comes from Google and Udacity working together.
And if you're not familiar with Udacity,
they're the experts in online training.
We're going to have a whole lot of fun chatting about it,
and I hope you have a whole lot of fun watching it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
LAURENCE MORONEY: So, Shanea, welcome to Coffee with Googler.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Thanks for having me.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And I know you've
been really busy with getting lots of courses out
and Udacity stuff, but you have a very special course
to tell us about today.
Could you--
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: enlighten us.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: I'm really excited about it, yeah.
We've been really busy.
We're actually launching a new Firebase course.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: You know Firebase, right?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Kind of.
I've heard of it.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Oh, my gosh.
Firebase is our new mobile backend as a service.
It allows anyone to use, create quickly,
a mobile backend for an Android or iOS app and web, as well.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And web.
Can't forget the web.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Yeah.
This course is going to focus immediately on Android and iOS.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: And so we're really, really excited
about it.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now, so, this course,
it's called Firebase in a Weekend?
Right?
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Oh, yeah.
This is actually a little bit different than any
of the other Udacity courses that we've created.
There's a lot that comes into mobile development.
There's a ton of different aspects.
This course is called Firebase in a Weekend
because we want new, intermediate, advanced
developers, anyone to be able to get up
and running on Firebase as a mobile backend in one weekend.
LAURENCE MORONEY: In one weekend.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Yeah.
You want to take a look?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sure.
INSTRUCTOR: Let's dive into the Firebase real time database
structure.
All data is stored as JSON objects.
You can think of the database as a cloud host
of [? JSONtry. ?] This means that your entire database is
stored as a single JSON object.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
LAURENCE MORONEY: I was just joking earlier.
Of course I'm familiar with Firebase.
You know, it's a suite of technologies.
And some of it's really to help you develop better apps.
And some of it's to grow your apps
and then to earn from them.
And I know in this weekend you're
focusing on the development of the app
so you get that foundation.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And there's a bunch of technologies.
Which ones does the course actually cover?
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: So it covers authentication.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Which is a really exciting.
It covers the real-time database.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Security.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: And, what we're
really excited about is, like you just
said, getting all of the foundations set up,
because Firebase, like you said, is a suite of options.
But what's really exciting is we actually
teach you to get all those foundations set up,
ready to go, so you can really just focus on the really fun
things in the app.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: The UI design, the engagement,
the earning, all of those different things.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sweet.
So it's a sweet suite.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So, typically with Udacity
you do this by building an app.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I assume there's
like an app that's going to be built in this.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Oh yeah.
Absolutely.
So we're really excited because we are actually teaching people
to build one of our favorite demo apps, which
is called Friendly Chat.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Friendly Chat?
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Friendly Chat.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: It is a messaging app.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: So by the end of it,
we are able to see messages coming back and forth.
You're able to authenticate users,
multiple people are able to chat with each other.
And also we teach you a new library,
which is called Firebase Auth UI which
makes authentication UI really easy and really simple
on both Android and iOS.
So you have all the foundation to get up
and running and chatting with your friends,
learning how to use all of the remote config messaging,
all of those different things.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Right off the bat.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
You mentioned remote config, and that's one of my favorites.
Right?
That with remote config it's very, very simple
for you to just change your UI on the fly,
because it's a server-side variable.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So instead of you
needing to deploy a new code base,
if you need to make changes, or you need to make tweaks,
you can do it by reading these variables out of the cloud.
It's mind-blowing. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: It's going to be-- It's
so much better for developers.
It's much faster and simpler.
And so what we really try to do with Firebase
is teach for an end to end, hand-holding,
there's a video instructor, so that people
feel as though they're interacting with a real person
teaching them how to build this app,
rather than just reading the documentation.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And one of the things that I really
like about how Udacity do it, is that it's
a very Socratic method.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It's not like your typical video training
where you sit back and watch a screen cast for two hours.
Hopefully you've got it all.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: [LAUGHING]
LAURENCE MORONEY: How would you explain it?
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Yeah, so Udacity is actually
really good for engagement.
You watch short chunks of video.
So two to three minutes, maybe five tops.
But then it's immediately followed by an assessment.
What we want to do is make sure that in every node
you get a chunk of information, you really learn that piece.
You can embody that piece before you move forward.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: And then you're
able to move back and forth, rather
than trying to scroll through a two-hour video
to find that one sentence that you're looking for.
Everything is broken up into notes,
which makes it really helpful.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And I personally, for me,
because I don't have great retention,
that when it's short like that and it's
challenged with a little bit of a quiz, it forces me to think.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And I might only spend like a half an hour
learning in a particular day, if I'm doing something
like this, rather than three or four hours,
but I retain so much more in that time.
Because it's much more intense, it's much more concentrated.
And I still remember some of these years later.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: And you're super hands on with it
because you're actually building.
You know, you're using GitHub, you're
learning the different things, you're looking at the difs,
you're seeing all of these different changes.
And they're small changes, so you really understand and see
the progression from start to finish rather than just
trying a bunch of things out and saying, "Does this really fit
together with this?"
It takes you in a linear order.
So you kind of get a round view of what's happening.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So the obvious next question
is, where do we get started?
How do I get this course?
How do I learn it?
And how much is going to cost me?
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Absolutely.
So developers can access the course at no cost to them.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
INSTRUCTOR: They can just go to Udacity.com/Google and click
on Firebase in a Weekend.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So the entire course, no cost?
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: No cost to them.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
So I can learn all of these things in a weekend?
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Absolutely.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
I've got to go try it out.
And there's one other thing that they will learn
and that's how not to cook a burger.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Yes.
A veggie burger.
LAURENCE MORONEY: A veggie burger.
Yes, of course.
And you'll have to watch the course to find out.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Absolutely.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So thank you so much Shanea.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: Of course.
Thanks for having me.
LAURENCE MORONEY: This has been so much fun.
I'm really looking forward to seeing the finished product.
I've seen little bits of it and I taught some of it.
And I just can't wait to see the finished product
and developers, I think, are going to love it.
SHANEA KING-ROBERSON: We're really proud of it.
Thank you so much, Laurence.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thank you.
So, if you want to learn more about this course,
go take a look at Udacity.com/Google.
And as always, if you have any questions for me
or if you've any questions for Shanea,
just leave them in the comments below.
And don't forget to hit that Subscribe button.
Thank you.