Hi all,
This is our October community update! Read last month’s update here.
We kicked off September with an exciting announcement: Bubble’s official SOC 2 Type II report and our new Enterprise plan, which makes it even more possible for us to support you all as you scale.
Another exciting announcement came two weeks ago, when we released the official BubbleCon 2023 agenda. I’m looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible in person and virtually in just a few short weeks! There’s a waitlist for in-person tickets, but virtual tickets are free, and you can get one here if you haven’t yet.
On our minds: Balancing innovation and stability
As many of you are aware, on September 19, we had a major incident related to the “Insert Dynamic Data” function that temporarily prevented people from being able to edit their applications. If you missed my postmortem and announcement of major changes we’re making to address editor stability and better handle incidents, you can read it here.
A few updates: We’ve already implemented the broader definition of “emergency” and its resulting escalation procedures internally. Q4 will also bring more automated testing to catch issues before they go live, better automated monitoring for real-time production oversight, and many longevity and reliability improvements to our code and infrastructure. Happily, we’ve also already found and fixed the cause of many of the other performance issues that cropped up last month, and we plan to continue investing in editor performance and stability
We’re just starting to dig into our Q4 product roadmap, but as promised, we’re shifting to place an even greater emphasis on reinforcing our technical foundation. That focus will remain in place long after the next three months are over — stability and reliability will be something we take very seriously as we tackle more ambitious new features. That said, we’re excited to strengthen the Bubble foundation, because that foundation will be exactly what enables us to keep up with technological innovation and introduce the features that you’re going to need in order to scale and grow.
Changes we made this month
As mentioned above, Bubble is now SOC 2 Type II compliant! Major kudos to the teams who have worked toward earning this report for many, many months. We’ve also doubled down on our commitment to GDPR — anyone building on Bubble can use our platform’s capabilities to meet GDPR obligations. On the heels of that milestone, we also officially launched Bubble for Enterprise, which combines the features our largest customers love with two new ones: SSO for their internal teams and centralized billing and account management. Read more about all that here.
We also released a toggle switch in all composer windows to make it easy to test out the new expression composer, which is currently in beta. The team has been hard at work resolving the most impactful bugs and just shipped an update. Please continue testing out the new composer — we’ve extended the timeline on the beta in the interest of making sure that the new composer is not only as useful as possible, but also very, very stable before we release it more widely.
You can now copy any element from one app to another. This function, which is available in the context menu, does a deep copy of the element and all of its children, carrying over inline properties when appropriate, or matching the new app’s style variables if they exist.
Some smaller improvements:
- Inspired by this Ideaboard submission with 64 upvotes, we now show a popup whenever you try to delete a field, reminding you to first check app search to see whether that field exists elsewhere in your app.
- When you use app search on a workflow event or action, your window will now automatically scroll to the relevant workflow.
- You can now see the ID number associated with a branch by clicking on its drop-down menu. This should help you find that information more quickly when you need it for things like testing API connections.
This month in numbers:
I’m going to be changing up the numbers we share here over the next couple months, both to align with our changing processes and to make sure what I’m sharing is useful and informative. This month, I’m only including numbers around engineering tickets and incidents. In future months, we’ll be adding more.
- Tickets closed by the engineering team: 131
- Average days to closure by engineering for high priority tickets: 2.8
- Average days to closure by engineering for all tickets: 10.2
- Incidents and regressions: 23
- Of those, the number that are high-severity (greater than 20 bug reports): 2
What we’re currently working on
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Improving bulk data manipulation: The team is working on performance enhancements for “schedule api workflow on a list.” (This was prioritized ahead of “delete a list of things,” but that’s still coming down the pike.)
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Introducing design breakpoints: First up, the team is building out the ability to create, edit, and delete a custom set of breakpoints in an app. This will make it easier to manage breakpoints in the responsive tab and create selectable presets for breakpoints as default data sources in conditionals — eliminating the need to remember pixel values each time you need to set a breakpoint on an element or use option sets as a workaround.
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Improving the UX of the editor: Using our new design system, which will help improve long-term editor stability, engineering work has started on refreshing the styles tab. It will get a new look and feel, improved search of element styles, a new ability to edit styles from styles list, and better organization and grouping of element types. (The changes will be built behind a feature flag so that we don’t disrupt the editor and tested very carefully before they’re released.)
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Improving performance and reliability related to workload: As we phase out all the ways apps were impacted by capacity limits, we’ve made a change to keep you from incurring workload for partially executed actions.
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Improving page load performance: The team is still hard at work switching Bubble over to a more modern JavaScript bundler, which will lead to across-the-board improvements to page load speed.
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Improving the agency RFP system: The team is now working on refining our AI-powered RFP spam detector, designed to cut down on noise so that agencies and prospective clients can find one another more easily.
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Making it easier to get started: The team recently launched two experiments: one that offers starter templates to new users during onboarding, and one that introduces fun accomplishment badges to celebrate new Bubblers’ early programming wins.
- Moving off CoffeeScript and onto Typescript: we are at 1% CoffeeScript, 24.5% Typescript, with the rest being JavaScript
A peek into the roadmap
Our product and engineering teams have begun digging into their Q4 roadmaps, so we should have more to report here next month. In the meantime, the AI team has made some exciting behind-the-scenes progress on design generation. (Come hear more about it at BubbleCon!) Also, rest assured that we are still planning to work on returning data from custom events — the team dedicated to the new expression composer will work on this when the beta is over.
(A quick note: Last month, some of you asked if we were working on a “create a list of things” action. We’ve heard your request here, and we’re currently evaluating different options and timelines for when we can tackle it.)
Team news
We welcomed seven new team members in September, including two stellar interns who have transitioned to full-time roles!
- John, joining us as an associate Bubble Developer
- Matthew, joining us as a senior product designer
- Leslie, joining us as a product designer
- Kara, joining us as a people operations generalist
- Chelsea, joining us as a senior user researcher
- Jenna, transitioning from her internship to a full-time user researcher
- Yunzhe (Daniel), transitioning from his internship to full-time software engineer
A few final updates
The Bubble Developer Certification, which has been waitlist-only since we announced it back in June, is opening up for everyone this month. Stay tuned for a forum post from our Education team with the official announcement very soon.
Over on the Bubble blog, I published a piece sharing my thoughts on how we can approach building an AI no-code editor responsibly, including the three principles our AI team is following today. You can read it here.
And finally, one more plug for BubbleCon, which is happening October 24–25 — again, virtual tickets are free, our guest speakers are excellent, and we’re all really looking forward to getting so many members of the community all in one place. Plus, Emmanuel and I are giving an exciting keynote update on the future of Bubble, plus holding a live AMA. If you want to read more about what to expect, the team published blog posts on why the virtual experience is going to be great and how you can get the most out of it.
Thank you all for your support, and wishing you a great start to fall,
Josh
End of an era!
BubbleCon is not affected in any way due to the inclement weather experienced last week. Look forward to seeing you there!