Funnily, I was working on cloning a particular piece of Firebase functionality, ...

GFischer · on May 17, 2017

Some individual Google employees are very helpful and open.

Unfortunately Google as a company and their corporate practices are nothing like that.

solomatov · on May 17, 2017

Some of their teams, for example tensorflow, are very very helpful.

dchichkov · on May 17, 2017

Yes. They are in the "Embrace" phase of the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Sure they are helpful. Have to be (considering the API drift between the Tensorflow releases and how late they were - Theano is the same exact idea and great implementation, only first released in 2009-ish).

But it's pretty easy to look a bit into the future, and predict what we would see during "Extend and Extinguish" phases of TensorFlow project.