[JonDevOps]

Hardcoding Firebase configuration, including the apiKey, directly into the source code is not recommended. While Firebase web API keys are not considered secret, this practice makes it difficult to manage different environments (e.g., development, staging, production). It's better to use environment variables (e.g., NEXT_PUBLIC_FIREBASE_API_KEY in a .env.local file) to store these values. This allows for easy configuration switching without code changes.

Originally posted by @gemini-code-assist[bot] in #469 (comment)