Hi all,
This is our latest monthly update to the community. You can read last month’s update here.
This month we made steady progress on a lot of the things we’ve been working on, and had a couple important releases. Another fun thing that happened was that Fast Company ranked us #5 in their list of most innovative small companies – this kind of recognition helps spread the word about no-code entrepreneurship, so we’re always happy when something like this happens.
We’ve continued to see a ton of community growth: we have more users than ever. Messages to our support channels were up 22% this month! A lot of our focus these days is investing in the team to keep up with this growth. We’re proud to see that even though messages were up 22%, our response time to those messages went down 20%, because of the hard work of the Success team, and the great people we’ve added to it in the last couple months. On the engineering side, we’ve also been doing our best to keep up with the corresponding increase in bug reports. Our average time to investigate bugs got a little worse this month, although digging into the numbers, that was largely due to some outstanding bugs with our Rich Text Editor plugin that have taken us a long time to fix, rather than slower responses across the board. Anyway, it’s exciting to see things really taking off, and we’re doing our best to maintain the same level of service for all the new users!
Changes we made this month
We had two major product releases this month:
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We switched the backend system that powers the Logs → Server Logs tab of the editor. The changes were entirely behind-the-scenes, but searching logs is now significantly faster! Fast log search is a very useful tool for managing growing apps, so we’re thrilled to see meaningful speed increases. The new system also makes it much easier for us to build internal analytics on bugs and issues, and identify and respond to patterns sooner, so it’s also an important step forward for the overall stability of our platform.
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We released improvements to our Bubble-supported Stripe Plugin as part of phasing out support for the v2 Stripe Checkout API in favor of the SCA-compliant v3 API. Previously, users who needed to save user credit cards and charge them later could only use v2; that functionality is now available in v3.
In addition, we made a number of small changes, focusing on improving product quality and fixing bugs and inconsistencies. These include:
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Changing the way we parse decimal numbers to better handle regional variation in what characters are used to separate thousands and decimals
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Changing the expected type of number inputs from text to number
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For public APIs, allowing the API Connector to call them directly from the user’s browser instead of proxying through our servers
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Upgrading the Full Calendar plugin to use the latest version of the library that powers it: we were on a really old version that was a frequent source of issues
In addition to product changes, we’ve been busy on a number of other fronts:
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We’ve started doing a series of live events to help spread the word about no-code! They take place on our YouTube channel and on Clubhouse
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We launched our first bootcamp for Bubble professionals, aimed at experienced Bubble users who want to build apps for a living. It sold out already, but another one will be open for registration soon!
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The On Deck No-Code Fellowship wrapped up with a fantastic demo day, and many very cool apps. We were the main sponsor for it, and it’s great to see the community expand to venues like this.
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We added 9 new posts to our App of the Day series: we love sharing your stories!
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We’ve continued expanding our Quick Tips video series with more short videos, as well as releasing an in-depth tutorial on privacy rules
This month in numbers
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Total number of conversations via bug reports or support@bubble.io: 6,609 (up 21%)
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Total received messages: 10,673 (up 22%)
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Average response time to messages: (2h 05m during business hours, down 20%)
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Time to resolve bug reports escalated to the engineering team: the average lifespan of open bugs and bugs resolved in the last month is 9.4 days (up from 6.7)
Things on our minds
Overall reliability of the platform continues to be top of mind for us, since we know how important it is to people building businesses on us. This month was better overall than the previous one, although we did have a couple of code releases that we had to roll back or release a follow-on fix for. We were happy to see that the Scheduled tier successfully protected many user apps from these issues, which helped mitigate the overall impact.
In general, our two buggiest features right now are our rich text editor plugin and our version control system. We’re working on improvements to both of them: a series of smaller fixes to the rich text editor, and a large infrastructure project around our asset-building system to get rid of some of the root causes of the version control. We fixed some of the last remaining bugs in the asset building system and expect that to be completely shipped this month; this won’t fix everything wrong with version control but it’s already eliminating quite a few of the causes of bugs. Overall, though, we’re not happy with the state of these features, and hope to get them to a better place.
What we’re currently working on
New initiatives:
- We’re developing a private bootcamp offering for schools and companies. If that’s something you’d be interested in, please reach out to us at support@bubble.io.
Updates on our ongoing initiatives:
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Our second Immerse cohort is hard at work on their apps. Please join us for demo day on April 14!
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We’re mostly done with the work on making it easier to debug issues with setting up custom domains
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We have a working proof of concept for our SelectPDF replacement. The next step is to set up cloud hosting for it and make it robust to run as a production service.
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We have a finalized design for our changes to the Responsive tab of the editor, and have a working flexbox-based rendering engine. We’re currently going element-by-element to port them to the new system, and finishing implementing the design.
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The rollout of our new asset-building system is mostly complete: there’s one last asset we’re doing performance testing on, and making some improvements to our test framework.
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The complete redesign of our editor is almost done with the second round of internal QA and bug fixing. We anticipate at least one more pass through the internal editor by our team before we start testing with handful of users: we’ve found a number of small bugs and design issues that we want to get to a good place on before sharing more broadly.
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Hiring: we are actively looking for roles across all aspects of the business. In particular, we’re looking for an EU-based person with previous Bubble experience to join the Success team: if that describes you and you’d like a job with us, please apply!
Thanks for all the support, and happy app building!
Josh and Emmanuel
