Interview: Creator of GitHub Action for Firebase
Jeremy Shore, a software engineer at PlayStation and creator of the GitHub Action for Firebase, is this week's featured GitHub Actions Hero. Shore began his career in gaming, spending free time building tools for Eve Online players and Google Developer Groups. That side-project habit eventually led him to GitHub Actions.
Shore manages three Firebase sites and more than 25 Firebase cloud functions. His action was initially built to inspect which functions had been modified and deploy only those needing changes. During the GitHub Hackathon, he extended it to push updates to Firebase and Firestore after builds complete, triggering cloud functions, pub-subs, or user notifications about new deployments. The updated feature is available on his GitHub profile.
Why Actions stands out
With nearly 4,000 Actions on the GitHub Marketplace, Shore appreciates the platform's flexibility:
Since [Actions] runs entirely on docker, you can do just about anything you can imagine. It's like playing with Lego and all the building blocks are provided but what you want to do is all up to you. With the additions of inputs, outputs, and even the toolkits it's easier than ever. You no longer have to find plugins just to get something that you want to work.
He also values keeping build code inside a project or pointing directly to a repository containing the Action you want. That approach simplifies sharing, staying current, and maintenance. Since Marketplace Actions are open source, developers can freely use, contribute to, or fork existing actions to suit their needs.
Early-adopter growing pains
Being among the first to adopt a platform comes with friction. Shore notes that before the official Actions announcement, documentation was sparse. At first, it was unclear how the build process handled dependencies or what steps were required. Branching was especially troublesome:
There were issues where you would create a branch in your job, but if one branch broke then all of them did even though it depended on the previous step that succeeded. You were also limited to what you could do, as inputs and outputs weren't available, so all I could do was set environment variables.
He initially worked around these limits by figuring out how the system worked backward. Since the global release, things have improved considerably: documentation is thorough, toolkits are available, and developers can build Actions with Node instead of only Docker. Repositories with getting-started templates also now exist.
A reminder to be patient
Shore's advice to newcomers is straightforward: expect to wait. Early on, he wanted to do much more than the platform allowed, which led to frustration and broken builds. The limitations eased over time as GitHub added features like saving and re-pulling artifacts to simplify stages and improve branch handling.
A lot of patience is needed for any kind of CI/CD, and this was a reminder. At the beginning, I wanted to do so many things, but there were limits which just caused frustration and things to not work.
For developers interested in building their own Actions, GitHub offers a Learning Lab course to get started. The GitHub Marketplace hosts hundreds of Actions, including Shore's Firebase action, and the GitHub Hackathon site features more examples and upcoming events.
