More than ever, modern software development is about integrating pre-existing code and services. Rarely is a modern application built from scratch. As you’ve seen, creating and maintaining code is a lot of work, so it’s better to leverage basic building blocks that someone else has created and is maintaining. This week, you’ll work with some code that interfaces to Google’s Firebase, a popular ‘back end as a service’ platform.

Like the first two courses in the specialization, in this last week you’ll apply what you’ve learned to your coding project. You’ve got a lot more breadth in your coding skills now, which is awesome! However, now it’s even more important that you anchor yourself in the user story and prototype you selected to make sure you know what you’re trying to have happen with your code. Otherwise, it’s easy to end up confused. While I hope you’re now comfortable using it, you do not have to use Google Firebase, though that’s certainly an option. Note 1: If you started here in the specialization, you’ll want to work from the options in the brief to build a prototype on JS Fiddle in HTML and CSS, and then layer in some Javascript. Note 2: If you’d like to start with a new concept from the brief for this course, that’s fine.