#FirebaserFriday Marissa Christy

I joined Firebase when I first joined Google three years ago. I was intrigued by the prospect of designing developer tools, having worked so closely with engineers my entire career. It’s very different from creating consumer products, but I’ve grown to love it. The Firebase Console is an amazing surface to work on, but the UX team tries to think holistically about the full developer experience (including the CLI and docs). It’s really stretched me as a designer.

Right now, I’m working on Firebase Auth and some other security initiatives. It’s an interesting space with a steep learning curve, even for people with a technical background. We’re actually working on ways to make it easier for developers to understand and implement security best practices. I hope that I can leverage my own learning process to make these topics more accessible to new developers. That’s what motivates me. Well, that and working with my awesome peers.

I actually have an Art History degree. Not even an art degree, which is reasonable in design. It was the closest thing to Architecture my school offered. I wanted to pursue architecture because it involved math and art. I also thought the creative work would offer me a sense of satisfaction, something I didn’t have a name for then, but I now know is called “flow.” I wasn’t even aware of web design (as it was called then) as a career. My own experience was limited to GeoCities and Dreamweaver and wasn’t entirely positive. My first job out of school was marketing for a software consultancy. With zero previous experience, I was being asked to write blog posts about topics like extreme programming and story point estimation. That was my first glimpse into the developer psyche.

I am still interested in architectural history and read a lot of that. I recently read “A Pattern Language” by the late Christopher Alexander. It’s more of a reference book, but it’s doubly interesting to me because of his work’s profound cross-relevancy to Computer Science. His attempt to catalog common architectural patterns really resonated with the people who created object oriented programming! I love finding these kinds of multidisciplinary intersections.

You can find me on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/marissachristy).