First they Came for the Backend Developers

Parse showed us what the brave new world of serverless development looked like. Before that, using tools like AWS allowed developers to build without managing their own servers. And before that, Joe in dev ops was on call to restart the company server if something went wrong. Parse offered an SDK that offered push notifications, authentication, and storage. Facebook bought them and shut them down. Google bought Firebase and picked up the torch. Albeit some pain points at the beginning, they have kept iterating. This week they announced Cloud Firestore, addressing a pain point around Firebase’s limited Realtime Database. It is easy to see how this can be the future. It makes development much easier, handling scaling and offering several turnkey solutions to common problems. Realm offers a similar product which doesn’t quite have all the features Firebase does. Even with cloud computing solution like AWS, backend developers are needed to get everything wired up. With solutions like Firebase, backend developers are not needed. Frontend developers and native developers, it’s only a matter of time before Firebase solves that problem too. By 2023, any web app or native app that only needs to parse simple data, without doing anything technically special, will be able to be built by someone with limited technical expertise.