The Social App: A Kotlin & Firebase App from Scratch

Hello people!

When studying some technology, or event when working on a project, is common not to have enough time to deep dive into some subject. Another situation that occurs frequently is not to have the possibility to practice some new tool or framework, limiting ourselves to a simple “hello world” app or a proof of concept, at best.

With this scenario in mind, I’m starting a new series of posts (that should extend itself to all this year), where we’ll work on a project from scratch, using two big “buzzwords” frequently used nowadays, when talking about Android: Kotlin & Firebase. Being a buzzword is not necessarily a problem, but along this process of developing a complete solution, we’ll discover not only the good parts but also that sometimes the things don’t work as expected.

The goal here is a bit audacious: to create a “default” social network, with an Android app written in Kotlin (including quality tools, testing, Material Design, accessibility, and so), with a functional automated pipeline, and well organized (with Git flow, pull requests with lint checks, automated Google Play publishing, Continuous Integration), using Firebase as a BaaS (Authentication, Storage, Push Notifications, Analytics), and implementing common features when talking about social networks (feed, friends, image upload, comments, chat).

Too audacious? I don’t know :)

There’s a chance that I cannot do it alone. So, if anyone wants to help, including app designers, all help will be great at this point.

At this time, I am publishing some progress in this repository (as I already wrote some posts in Portuguese), but soon I’ll start to translate them and post here as well!