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A thing I've been noticing is that PaaS companies (e.g. Netlify, Cloudflare, Heroku) are shipping tools that let you test locally on your own machine. The expe

A thing I've been noticing is that PaaS companies (e.g. Netlify, Cloudflare, Heroku) are shipping tools that let you test locally on your own machine. The experience is unmatched. I'd bet it's what led Google to (attempt to) do the same thing for Firebase, although I've noticed as well that their emulation is still off. Overall, I hope this is a trend that continues. The fact that these things are sometimes baked into their clients, which are usually freely licensed and developed in the open, available for patching, is something that hugely eliminates some of the lock-in risk associated with building on top of platforms. Worst case scenario? The company either goes out of business, deprecates some corner of its platform that you're relying on, or becomes prohibitively expensive to use, so you spin up a VPS and daemonize the client. This doesn't work for large projects, but for anything that is relatively small (but not so small as to characterize the development costs as trivial), it's sufficient.

arcturus17 6y ago
Well my experience with Heroku has always been that the code barely cares that it's being hosted there: a few config/environment variables here and there and that's it. Nothing to do with Firebase, where your project structure, front-end code, scripting utilities, config files, etc. become coupled with Firebase even if you try your best to contain the coupling. I'm interested, what does Heroku offer in the way of "local testing" anyway? I just use a web framework's normal test runners in my local shell.
q845712 6y ago
anecdote: about a year ago we had a Rails app on heroku and ran into a problem where the tests passed locally but hung in the remote heroku-CI pipeline. We followed the instructions for running the tests locally but ultimately weren't able to reproduce the hang, despite it happening every time in Heroku CI. Their support was good but ultimately it felt like some developers in the CI/container/platform team poked at it for some time-boxed session and couldn't figure out exactly what was going wrong. The problem had started after upgrading some gems, and we eventually solved it by upgrading some other (unrelated) gems. Somehow there was a very precise set of gem-versions that were incompatible with something else in the hosted environment. I've forgotten details but the tests that hung involved capybara or some part of the front-end / "integration" testing, which IMO tends to be flakier than backend-only tests. Anyway sharing here just to note that while thankfully it was a CI issue and not a production issue, it did convince me that "test locally on your own machine" tooling still had some subtle gaps vs. what was happening in "the cloud."

arcturus17 6y ago

Well my experience with Heroku has always been that the code barely cares that it's being hosted there: a few config/environment variables here and there and that's it. Nothing to do with Firebase, where your project structure, front-end code, scripting utilities, config files, etc. become coupled with Firebase even if you try your best to contain the coupling. I'm interested, what does Heroku offer in the way of "local testing" anyway? I just use a web framework's normal test runners in my local shell.

q845712 6y ago

anecdote: about a year ago we had a Rails app on heroku and ran into a problem where the tests passed locally but hung in the remote heroku-CI pipeline. We followed the instructions for running the tests locally but ultimately weren't able to reproduce the hang, despite it happening every time in Heroku CI. Their support was good but ultimately it felt like some developers in the CI/container/platform team poked at it for some time-boxed session and couldn't figure out exactly what was going wrong. The problem had started after upgrading some gems, and we eventually solved it by upgrading some other (unrelated) gems. Somehow there was a very precise set of gem-versions that were incompatible with something else in the hosted environment. I've forgotten details but the tests that hung involved capybara or some part of the front-end / "integration" testing, which IMO tends to be flakier than backend-only tests. Anyway sharing here just to note that while thankfully it was a CI issue and not a production issue, it did convince me that "test locally on your own machine" tooling still had some subtle gaps vs. what was happening in "the cloud."