DOUG STEVENSON: Hey, welcome to "Meet Firebase," where
you get to meet the Googlers that make Firebase happen.
My name is Doug Stevenson, and on the show with me
today is Laurence Moroney.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thanks for having me here today.
DOUG STEVENSON: Thanks for being on the show.
So tell me, what do you do with the Firebase team?
LAURENCE MORONEY: So I'm a developer advocate
on the Firebase team.
So I focus on helping developers understand the Firebase
technologies and helping us understand what
developers are doing with it.
DOUG STEVENSON: So which teams do you work with in particular?
LAURENCE MORONEY: So the technologies in Firebase?
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So yeah, we've got, like, 15 of them.
So there's a number of them that I work with from Firebase Cloud
Messaging and Firebase Notifications, App Indexing,
some Dynamic Links, some Remote Config, and of course, Firebase
Auth.
DOUG STEVENSON: So you're in a new video series right now
called "Pirate Metrics."
Do you do any swashbuckling in that?
LAURENCE MORONEY: I really wish I had an opportunity
to do some swashbuckling.
But unfortunately, budget meant that I just
got a plastic parrot and an eye patch.
DOUG STEVENSON: Hm, that's too bad.
If you want to watch that video, you
can click the link in the description below.
You also have another new video coming out,
a geocast that you're working on with the Maps team, right?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yes.
So as well as advocacy for Firebase,
I'm a real geek for Google Maps.
And I love Google Maps and love all the technologies
around that.
So it's been a real privilege to work with some of them.
And I'm doing a couple of videos on one
of my favorite parts of it, which is called the Places API.
And the Places API, really, it helps
you to understand your place in the real world.
And we have, like, 100 million points
of interest in the database.
And you can detect it, [INAUDIBLE] against them,
and that kind of stuff.
So we've got a fun couple of videos
based around a Places-based game that I wrote,
where I'm going to be hosting the video,
and I'm going to actually be doing it with a virtual cartoon
character beside me who's one of the characters
in the game itself.
DOUG STEVENSON: Wow.
That sounds fascinating.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
DOUG STEVENSON: So I think that one will be available also
in the description below.
So this will be the first time we'll
see a Googler co-host a video with an animated character.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, so a barely-human
alongside a simulated human.
DOUG STEVENSON: So you're doing something else
with location-based services.
You have a robot that determines your location.
What's that?
LAURENCE MORONEY: I do.
Yes, that's this little guy here.
I brought him along on the show, because he would have been
jealous if I got to come on the show and he didn't.
We have a conference called Google Cloud Next.
And at this conference, I'm doing a talk on geolocation.
Now geolocation, if you have a GPS,
is very, very easy, because GPS satellites will detect you.
But there's a couple of things with that.
Number one, it doesn't always work indoors.
And number two, it's expensive in terms
of both battery and circuits.
So there's a great need of enterprises
to have cheap devices that they can use to geolocate--
like, for example, if you've got a fleet of trucks or something
along those lines.
And so we have an API called Geolocation API.
And what that does is that, if you sniff the Wi-Fi signals
around you or the cell tower signals around you,
and you get their BSSIDs, they're
called, along with the signal strength,
and you pass that up to Google, what Google will do is,
by triangulating you from these based on the signal strength,
it will then pass you back an estimate
for where you are in the world at this moment,
and with an accuracy radius around that.
So for my talk, in order to have a gratuitous demo showing this,
I built this little guy, this little robot.
And he has a Python program on him.
What it does is that, when I'm going
to send him running around the conference hall,
he's like an autonomous little driver thing.
He'll go around the conference hall.
These are little ultrasound sensors rather than eyes,
and so they will hopefully stop him bumping into people's feet.
And then he will be sniffing the Wi-Fi signals.
There's no cell on this one, so it'll be just Wi-Fi.
And then getting the location back, and then
those latitude and longitude we'll plot on a map.
DOUG STEVENSON: OK.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I call him Rudy.
DOUG STEVENSON: Rudy, all right.
Does Rudy move?
Can he make a little trek on my desk here?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, Rudy moves.
So I have him-- he's got a little random program that
will get him moving.
So I've just launched it.
It takes a little while for him to warm up.
So you're going to have to catch him if he falls off your desk.
DOUG STEVENSON: Oh, we have a barrier over here.
I'm eagerly waiting.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Drum roll.
DOUG STEVENSON: Go, Rudy, go!
LAURENCE MORONEY: So there's a little program
in there that I'm kind of--
there here goes.
DOUG STEVENSON: OK, so.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I've scaled it down so
that he will do the kind of movements
that he would do on a desk instead of a conference room.
So he's only moving a few inches instead of moving a few feet
and wandering around.
DOUG STEVENSON: Oh, he's making a run for the edge of the desk.
LAURENCE MORONEY: He's making a beeline for the coffee.
So yeah.
So what he's actually doing is, as he moves around like this,
he's only moving two or three inches.
But when I'm doing it in the room,
he'll be moving about 20 feet, and then he'll stop,
and he'll take a reading of where he's at.
DOUG STEVENSON: It's precariously
close to falling off.
LAURENCE MORONEY: These are ultrasound as well.
So hopefully, he's detecting that he's
going to fall off the cliff.
And so instead of two inches, he'd move about 20 feet,
and then take a scan, and then store
the information on Firebase.
DOUG STEVENSON: Oh, all right.
Let's put him back in the box.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So yeah.
OK.
Yeah, see.
He likes the coffee.
DOUG STEVENSON: No, yeah, yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: He's thirsty.
DOUG STEVENSON: He knows what's good.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I'll turn him off the best way I can.
Let's [INAUDIBLE] the battery.
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Back to bed.
DOUG STEVENSON: So you have a show kind
of like this one called "Coffee With a Googler," is that right?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, "Coffee With a Googler"
is a show where I just get to have a whole lot of fun
going around and meeting--
oh, product placement.
Sorry about that.
Meeting various Googlers and talking about what they do.
So a little bit like this, like you're focused on Firebase.
So I really like to meet just all kinds of people from Google
and all kinds of interesting projects.
And we've met with people who are responsible for the Android
Auto in cars, for a lot of artificial intelligence.
And it gives me the opportunity, being purely selfish,
to go out there and meet a lot of great people,
and drink a lot of great coffee.
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah.
Would you care to meet a great monkey?
We have Nate.
He wants to be on your show as well.
LAURENCE MORONEY: He's welcome anytime.
DOUG STEVENSON: OK we'll arrange that.
I'll have his people talk to your people.
LAURENCE MORONEY: His people can talk to my people.
DOUG STEVENSON: So you're all over the place
with developer products at Google, it sounds like.
It sounds like you're from all over the place as well.
And particularly, your accent, I'm
having problems placing that.
So I'm curious, where are you from?
LAURENCE MORONEY: I always ask people, well, guess,
when they say that.
DOUG STEVENSON: Guess.
So I don't know.
My first instinct was to say New England.
Or I'm sorry, not New England, New Zealand.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Actually, I was born in the Middle East.
And then I grew up between Ireland and Wales.
So I left Ireland then as a late teenager.
Did my education in the UK, some in Wales, some in England.
And then I emigrated to the US in my mid-20s.
And so I've got that kind of crazy mixed-up accent.
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah.
And another one of the things you do is writing.
And I have this long list of things that you've written.
I don't even know where to start with that.
So tell me, what do you do with writing?
LAURENCE MORONEY: So yeah.
I guess it's three different things.
Number one is programming books.
I've done lots and lots of programming books.
But I kind of moved away from them,
because programming books are-- there's
a law of diminishing returns, the amount of effort
versus the amount of sales.
They don't sell what they used to, unfortunately.
Also, I've done a bunch of sci-fi novels,
and some screenplay writing for-- like,
I have a produced sci-fi TV show, which was really cool.
DOUG STEVENSON: Wow.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It was a pilot of a show that didn't
go beyond pilot, unfortunately.
And then there's also comic book writing.
At the moment, I've just finished writing for the--
have you heard of the movie "Equilibrium"?
It's that Christian Bale [INAUDIBLE].
DOUG STEVENSON: I've heard of it, yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So it's its 15th anniversary this year.
And for the 15th anniversary, they're
actually releasing a comic book prequel to the movie.
And I got to write that, which is really exciting.
DOUG STEVENSON: Wow, that's pretty interesting.
So you have your work at Google.
You have your writing.
And if that wasn't enough, you also
volunteer with an organization called the Breakaway
Program, which is for professional ice hockey
players--
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's right.
DOUG STEVENSON: --who are retired from athletics.
So what do you do with them?
LAURENCE MORONEY: So what I'm doing
with them is that it's really--
as players are leaving the professional ranks,
it can be a hard landing in the real world.
So I'm really trying to help them have a soft landing
once they get back into the real world
through helping them maybe explore a career as a software
engineer.
And so we've partnered here at Google
with a company called Udacity.
And Udacity have some great tutors.
I was one of them.
And they have a Beginning Android class,
which was designed, really, so that anybody, not just
a computer science major or a computer geek,
could learn how to program.
So I figured I'd try it with two former ice hockey players.
And they both thrived at this.
They did a great job.
So we're expanding that now to launch a program so that,
as players are coming out of the league,
to explore learning Android development
and learning software engineering
as a potential career path.
And with Udacity and the Nanodegree Plus,
then there's the job guarantee, so that,
if you don't find a career within six months of finishing
it, they refund everything.
So that makes it very low-risk as well.
So it's really exciting.
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah, I can't wait to see how that works out.
Because I'm actually a huge ice hockey fan, so.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I'm recruiting you to help.
DOUG STEVENSON: Oh, really?
With a Nanodegree, it's kind of interesting.
That ties back into Firebase, because they
use Firebase Test Lab as a way to help automatically
test the results of some of the homework they do.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, we can't get a video
with Doug Stevenson on it not mentioning Test Lab.
This man loves Test Lab.
DOUG STEVENSON: That's right.
And there's more to come.
So I'm all about the Test Lab.
So the way that they're using Test Lab to grade the homework
is, I think, a fairly creative use of Test Lab.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, definitely.
DOUG STEVENSON: Speaking of creative uses of Firebase,
you have a personal project that makes use of Firebase Cloud
Messaging.
So what's that all about?
LAURENCE MORONEY: So I had these couple of smart light bulbs
in my house that are programmable,
so you can set their color.
So I built a little Android application
that can set their color.
But that was boring.
So I said, OK, what if I build a website,
and that website allows anybody in the world
to pick a couple of colors, and then use Firebase Cloud
Messaging to tell the Android application to set
the colors of the light bulbs?
So I did that.
I put it up online.
And I can share the URL.
We'll share it in the description
below if anybody wants to play with it.
And it's been a lot of fun with people around the world
changing it and changing my light bulbs.
And sometimes, I'm sitting in my home office,
and the lights keep changing.
And I'm trying to guess where people are from
based on the colors.
DOUG STEVENSON: Wow.
Wow.
So it sounds like you really have
your hands full with a lot of different parts of Firebase.
But I'd like to focus on authentication right now.
So I have a little quiz to play with you.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Uh-oh.
DOUG STEVENSON: It relates to authentication.
I'm going to give you 15 seconds.
And in that 15 seconds, I want you
to name as many different mechanisms for authentication
as you can.
One obvious one is a password.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's the only one I know [INAUDIBLE].
DOUG STEVENSON: OK.
Well, then the game is over.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
So as well as username and password,
there's federated identity, right?
So using Facebook or Twitter or that kind of thing to sign in.
You could have biometrics, right?
Like fingerprints, like the fingerprint sensors
that are on a lot of phones.
There's retina scans.
There's things like CAPTCHAs that you
do associated with a password to just prove
that this is a real person.
And now some CAPTCHAs are actually smart,
that they start--
DOUG STEVENSON: All right, time's up.
You're using your time telling me about CAPTCHA.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, sorry.
DOUG STEVENSON: So let's see.
We had password.
You mentioned CAPTCHA, which is not really authentication.
It's more of a proving that you're human and not a robot.
But yeah, that's definitely one.
You mentioned lot of biometrics, voice, retina scan.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Face recognition.
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah.
Well, I would say photo ID, actually, is
kind of the same form, right?
Just one's automated, and one's printed on a card.
There's also fingerprint.
There's even signature, which could be a way to--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, yeah.
I forgot about that.
DOUG STEVENSON: --authenticate that a message is from someone.
Now there's also a whole classification
of authentication that has to do with possession.
So there's those token generators, you know,
where you read off a series of numbers that
only appears on that one token.
And there's wireless tags, USB tokens,
and over-the-air password sent to you from somewhere else that
verifies your authenticity.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah.
I guess also nearby objects, like the way your Android Wear
watch can unlock your phone.
[INAUDIBLE]
DOUG STEVENSON: Exactly.
Yeah, I would put that in the possession category, where
you have something that is supposed to be unique.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
I think we have a new developer advocate
for Firebase Auth, everybody.
DOUG STEVENSON: I just took some time
to research these ahead of time.
So I get to be the expert because I
spent some time doing that.
All right.
Laurence, good job on the game.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thank you.
DOUG STEVENSON: And thank you for being on the show.
And thank you for watching.
And if you want to see more great video content like this,
be sure to click the Subscribe button right here
on the Firebase channel on YouTube.
And we'll see you next time.
[APPLAUSE]
All right.
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]