If you’re using Firebase with a server to perform tasks like generating thumbnails of images, filtering message contents and censoring data, or fanning data out to multiple locations in your Firebase database, chances are you’re using (or need to use) Firebase Queue.

Firebase Queue is a fault-tolerant multi-worker job pipeline built on Firebase. It provides you with a way to organize workers or perform background work on your Firebase database or files.

This isn’t a tutorial on how to use firebase-queue, it is simply to show you how you can host & run your queue workers in a scalable environment (Google app engine).

A few months ago Facebook released Account Kit which “helps people quickly and easily register and log into your app using their phone number or email address as a passwordless credential”.

Account Kit is really really helpful for a couple of reasons; users don’t need to remember a password for your app, it supports SMS-based authentication for hundreds of countries, and it’s really easy to setup.

So you’re eager to get on with Lesson 2 of the Udacity Android fundamentals course but if you’re like most students in our study jam, you don’t have good internet access & you’ve been using offline course materials. The course has probably been going great till you hit the internet roadblock in lesson 2 (Connecting Sunshine to the cloud). The app needs internet to fetch the weather data.

Every once in a while I like to reflect on life. And there’s no better time than now. I literally have nothing to chase, no deadline to beat, no books, no exams. So I’ve been thinking, alot about the unobvious benefits of being a software developer.

Programming involves a lot of thinking and overtime, it changes the way you think about life and stuff in general. So here are five important lessons that I’ve learned through my experience writing code for the most part of my waking hours.

If you watch Homeland or are familiar with CIA operation, then you probably know what happens when an agent dies in the line of service. They become a star, which is placed on the memorial wall at an emotional ceremony and words along these lines will be said -

“For the men and women of the CIA, this constellation is more than a memorial, more than a quiet tribute. Each star holds memories of a brave intelligence officer whose example we follow, a treasured colleague whose wisdom we keep, or a lost friend we will miss.