This is an interview with one of the speakers, Marina Coelho.

Q: I hear you also have a workshop? What is this about?
A: Yes! Me and Rosário Fernandes, another Developer Relations Engineer from Firebase, will run a Workshop called “Releasing and Monitoring your Android app with Firebase”. We will show how Firebase helps developers to release their Android apps for different audiences, monitor performance and track crashes. The Firebase products we are going to use in this Workshop are Test Lab, App Distribution, Performance Monitoring and Crashlytics.

Q: Which office are you based in?
A: I am based in the 6 Pancras Square office in London. It’s a big building next to the famous Kings Cross Station.

Q: Does DevRel have offices in EMEA?
A: Yes! In fact, we are expanding the Developer Relations teams in EMEA right now, so anyone who’s interested in applying for a DevRel position can do so by checking the Google careers website.

Q: What excites you about using Firebase?
A: The most exciting thing for me is that there are products for all phases of an application’s lifecycle. From the time you’re just prototyping and starting development, to when you’re ready to test and release your app, and even later, when you need to monitor its usage. It is very practical to have tools for all these phases in one place.

Q: What was the first Firebase product you’ve used and how did it help your project?
A: The first Firebase product I ever used was Crashlytics. At the time I was working at a company that was migrating an application with very, very old Java code to a more modern version that used Kotlin. We didn’t have any way to track errors back then, and adding Crashlytics was key during this process of refactoring all the features while ensuring they operated well with the older parts of the code. I can’t count how many times the crash reports helped us fix what was needed to deliver the best possible app version to our users.

Q: What is one Firebase tool that you think every developer should try?
A: Do I really have to choose just one? I love Crashlytics, as I said above, and I’ve used Firestore a lot. But if I had to choose just one tool, I would say Authentication. Implementing a secure authentication flow from scratch is complicated and time consuming, and with Firebase Authentication it is possible to do this very quickly and easily. In addition, there are several authentication methods that you can use: Anonymous, by phone, by email and password or using some very popular federated identity providers. I can’t even imagine how long it would take me to implement all these methods without Firebase Authentication.

Q: What’s your favourite beverage to start your day?
A: Personally, I don’t think there is an answer to this question other than: coffee!