For this weeks weekend project I decided to dive a bit deeper into Google Firebase and built a commenting system for this Gridsome-based blog from scratch. It was definitely not worth the time in the sense of adding commenting possibility to a blog but as a learning journey I’d say this was a fun little project.

Gridsome is a JAMstack tool which means that features like commenting need to be implemented either as a third-party solution or by using a separate backend functionality be it serverless functions, a traditional REST backend or something similar. Firebase is an interesting app development platform startup that was aquired by Google in 2014. What makes Firebase intresting for this kind of applications is its realtime database and hosted pluggable authentication system. Google offers a fairly generous free tier for the services so testing it out for a personal project like this is costs you only your time.

I’ll write more in depth about technical details later but for now, I’m happy to get this thing published. The biggest lesson learned here was that as with any tehcnologies, even though the 2 minute demo seems really clean and easy, most real worl implementations need to focus on details that are hard to get right if you care about user experience and security.

(Obviously, this first implementation is very unpolished and not feature-complete, but it should work, that’s the most important thing for now.)