Two years ago today there was a torrential downpour in San Francisco. Despite the abysmal weather, a group of 250 friends and passionate technologists came to see Andrew, Vikrum, Michael and I introduce Firebase to the world.
Vikrum, who doubles as our Head of Operations and our Chief Naming Officer, codenamed the product ‘Plankton’ when we started coding in the fall of 2011. As 2011 turned into 2012 we found a name we loved, iterated on our API, and systematically gathered feedback from an incredible group of developers — many of whom presented their own Firebase-powered apps at our launch on the rainy night of April 12th, 2012. (Thanks Sara, Judy, Smita, Ted, Jeff, Felix, Melih, Joey, Ben, & Mehul!)
The past two years have been incredible. We’ve consistently been astonished with the support you’ve shown for both our product and our team. You’ve built things on Firebase that we never dreamed of, and your creativity and enthusiasm inspire us to keep making Firebase better every day.
Our community just crossed 62,000 developers and is growing every day. Our team is now 15 people strong with 2 more joining soon, and we’re hiring!
Some of the highlights from the past two years include:
- Concieving and annoucing a new way to secure apps built with only client-side code.
- Launching SDKs for iOS and Android.
- Raising our Series A from Albert and Chip, investors with deep domain expertise.
- Taking the beta label off last August.
- Building bindings for Angular and Ember to make Firebase the best choice for a backend when using those frameworks.
We’ve got a number of great new features and improvements coming in the next few weeks and months. Follow us @Firebase on Twitter for the latest news, email firebase-support@google.com with technical questions, and join our Google Group to get involved with our developer community. We can’t wait to see what you build.
Finally, here’s the video from our launch two years ago!