adv-firestore-functions VS extensions

I retired my package, adv-firestore-functions, because I could not keep up with it anymore. However, most of the code is still good. I made it easy to use Counters with a colCounter function. There are several problems with this method:

The number one problem with Firestore is hands down the lack of counters. I literally wrote a package to do everything in Firebase Functions, and I learned after 6 months, I hate Firebase Functions. All the code missing from Firestore that takes up your time is relational and counter related. Now I know on the Frontend it is just as bad. However, I wrote some reusable Functions which I have talked about in other posts to make your life a little easier. However, some things are just impossible in Firestore. I seriously hate noSQL in general, but not having counters is terrible. I also wrote some reusable Firestore Rules for counters. Everything is usually dealing with counters.

Based on my relevant search index, I created a simple frontend version you can use in your app.

If each followers_index holds 10,000 users, then we only grab 100 documents for 1 million followers. If you're lucky enough to have 100 million followers, then yes, you would need to create 10,000 documents. That is actually doable in a Firestore function with my Bulk Update Function in theory. The most amount of followers ever recorded on any platform is under 200 million.

Method 1: - use my adv-firestore-functions package... one line of code in your firebase function... done.

The beauty of this, is it automatically scales. It creates a new index document after 10,000 items (you can set this with max, see the docs). It will automatically remove a product from the index if the product doc is delete from the collection. It automatically adds. I have id sorting and value sorting options that I spoke about in Part 3.

Basically you create your own index using __ between every combination of items in the array. This would give you search options. You could do this on the front end, or on the backend in Firebase Functions. Here I am only covering the frontend, although I may one day add this ability to my adv-firestore-functions package.

As the author of adv-firestore-functions, I feel like I have figured out how to hack every problem the Firestore Team refuses to solve internally, except how to connect the relational data of a follower feed.

I agree for 99% of extensions their model is amazing. And I wouldn't expect me to come up with a better one any time soon.

The problem is that I want to do more in my launcher. Two examples:

- I wasn't happy with the official bitwarden extension, because going through the clipboard and copy/pasting individual items felt cumbersome. They also only supported one vault even though I asked about this years ago [0]! In raycast I wrote my own bitwarden extension that hooked into Hammerspoon and used the AX spoon to autofill credentials. That felt very hacky though so in my own launcher I am using the accessibility API directly through swift-rs.

- I wanted to build my own keyboard centric matrix chat client into raycast. I got pretty far, but in the end I was just too limited by the available components. Also I discovered that once your extensions heap reaches 100 MiB, it just gets killed. That basically made it impossible to just load the matrix-sdk including crypto.

In the end I just didn't want to keep investing time in some proprietary software that doesn't allow me to do what I want to do :)

[0] https://github.com/raycast/extensions/issues/1544

Raycast creates an open a pull request in their repository, on your behalf!

Check the PR: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/pull/6648

This is the repo: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/abdbd1f0a926fbe7cea5e96f0f2c62f502efa0f3/extensions/mozilla-firefox/

Raycast can do this via an extension: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/blob/c0832985249dcb02164ea6322ca0134ca093e711/extensions/openai-gpt3/

Audit their extensions? This is an Amphethamin extension. Please take a look at the list of dependencies from npm. How much time will it take to audit? https://github.com/raycast/extensions/blob/34c65c7f190ad172e46c75384600aa938f932e98/extensions/amphetamine/package-lock.json

This is how fancier automations like the Raycast extension (source) are built.