Last week we traveled up to Portland for the second annual RealtimeConf!

We attended in 2011 and it was one of the best conferences of the year. At the time we were still operating under our codename, Plankton. (The story of buying Firebase.com is one for another blog post).

There were a number of frameworks and products that were pre-launch or very young last year. Talking to the authors about their hopes and goals was inspiring. It has been fascinating to see how each of them have evolved in the past 12 months, so, as you can imagine, we were keen to go back to Portland and see everyone in person.

Firebase itself has come a long way. In the past year we’ve solidified our direction, launched in private beta, raised a round offunding and talked to more users than we can count.

This year’s RealtimeConf didn’t disappoint. The &yet team, who organized, kicked off the conference by guiding the attendees to the venue behind a marching band.

Other highlights included a real-time merit badge, a personalized stamp (yes, the library-book variety) of your twitter handle, and an empty passport for collecting said stamps. It was all pretty epic.

We returned this year as speakers also. Michael gave a 10 minute lighting talk that gave an overview of Firebase.

He gave a high level overview of our core-concepts,

• Real-time data synchronization.
• Persistent & reliable data store.
• Automatic Scaling.
• Data Accessibility.

talked about common use-cases, and showed off some examples in the Graphical Debugger.

We had an excellent time seeing old faces and meeting new ones. A big thanks to Adam and the &yet team, we’ll be back again next year and hopefully we’ll see you there too!