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Welcome, and Thanks!

These videos have been 3 years in the making! I started this project in the spring of 2014 with a simple idea: what could I build without having to manage a server? The results were interesting, but not overly compelling. I wanted to SELL THINGS, and doing that by knitting together various services was a pain.

And then came AWS Lambda. It looked fascinating, but required a whole lot of knowledge about AWS. Then, in March 2017 Firebase launched Firebase Functions and I was all over it. The result is what you see here.

I put a lot of love into these videos and a whole lot of time. I hope it shows, and I hope you really enjoy it! You have the code that goes along with the videos, and I need to walk you through setting it all up before you dig in and try to code along with me.

Getting Set Up

The web site that you see in the video was built with Middleman, a static site generator that is built with Ruby. You don't need to use it. I've prebuilt the site for you, so instead of installing and starting up Middleman you can use this:

firebase serve

...which will load the prebuilt site (located in /build) and serve it locally. If you want to use Middleman, go for it and follow the install instructions on their site.

Settings

You'll quickly notice, if you run the code, that much of it won't work right away. This is because you need to add some information first! Specifically you need to...

  • Sign up with Firebase and create a project. Once you do that you'll need to add your settings as you see in the video.
  • If you want to follow along with the Drip demo, you'll need to sign up with them too. It's free and very, very worth it.
  • I use dotenv, which is a really easy Node configuration tool that lets you set environmental variables within your project. You might see me using that at certain points in the video.

... And Finally: A Favor

I know that there's a general belief that if you put it online, expect it to be shared. As you're watching these videos I would ask you to consider their quality. It took me months to create them, and it's largely because I'm a stickler for creating the best experience possible. I can't do that for free. So... please: reconsider before sharing these things. I'd like to keep making these productions!