Two minor accomplishments:
I was accepted into the Visual Code Live Share Preview so I was able to install the vscode extension and activate it. Hoping to schedule a "share" soon, only the host needs to be accepted to the preview.
I was able to successfully deploy a test Firebase Callable HTTPS Function and call it from my web app. I think this will be a better option than embedding Node/Express inside Firebase Functions because the SDK handles a lot of the work.
