This is the one big thing that really needed to happen to Firebase to get it ready for the world and having worked with these guys a bit, I know it was a diffic

This is the one big thing that really needed to happen to Firebase to get it ready for the world and having worked with these guys a bit, I know it was a difficult problem to solve. I think the solution they came up with is actually pretty novel and exhibits the qualities I strive for these days: 1) It's as declarative of an approach as it can be without sacrificing flexibility. 2) It follows the structure of your data and is itself a datastructure that can be trivially manipulated. 3) It centralizes a concern. Security measures often end up spread all over the place, making it very difficult to reason about what is or is not correctly handled. Not so with this model. I'm excited to see what people do with Firebase now that the one thing that was really holding it back has a solution. I know from my standpoint, it's certainly nice to have someone else dealing with the nightmares of real-time scaling and security so that I don't have to.