Monthly Community Update - Aug 2024

Announcements
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Hi all,

Allen here! I’m back for month two of covering Josh’s monthly community update while he’s out on parental leave. You can read July’s update here.

If you missed it, we hosted a live Product Sesh last week that took an in-depth look at Bubble’s Q3 roadmap. I’ll touch on several of those topics here, but I definitely encourage you to check out the recap or watch the recording if you’re interested in a deeper dive.

Here’s what we’ve been working on:

What we shipped last month

Bubble Boost Day: The team recently shipped 30 editor updates in 48 hours for Bubble Boost Day! This was a huge joint effort across pretty much every team at Bubble, along with so many community members. ‌Thanks to all of you for your requests and suggestions. It’s been really exciting to see the positive reception. Updates included several highly requested hotkeys, adding a list count to the debugger, and property editor improvements. Read the full list here.

We’ve been trying out different ways to get these quality of life improvements done. These mini sprints are working well, so we’re planning for the next Bubble Boost Day in December!

Workload management: Last month, we launched infinite recursion protection for all apps. This feature lets you set ‌a limit on the number of times workflows can schedule themselves. Now, you’ll get an email notification when infinite recursion protection terminates a workflow.

New optimization services: If you’re an expert in the agency marketplace, you can now update your profile ‌to include performance optimization as a service you provide. And if you’re looking for an agency or developer to help optimize your app’s performance, you can now find them all here.

Agency account updates: We gave the Agency account page (our new name for the Agency plan) an update to showcase the benefits for professional Bubble devs — including access to bulk data operations and a free certification attempt if you sign up before September 1.

Changes to SendGrid: We recently changed how Bubble integrates with SendGrid, our email provider. If your app sends emails directing end-users to external links, you’re now required to create your own SendGrid API key for security purposes. More details and instructions on how to get started are here.

What we’re working on

Platform reliability: Reliability is always our #1 priority. We’ve been able to move out of the phase of short-term changes, so now we’re doubling down on longer-term updates to ‌our database and cloud infrastructure.

This was a big topic during the Product Sesh, and Payam, Bubble’s director of engineering, got into the nitty-gritty of how our team is approaching this work. You can rewatch that section of the session here.

Platform performance: In June, we offered any Bubbler early access to help test updates to editor performance. You can still try out the feature during this early access phase, and we’re rolling this change out to all users soon.

Next up: As one of many things we’d like to do to improve page load speed, we’re implementing LeanJS, which is a technology that helps simplify our frontend framework and brings us closer to only serving the assets that need to be served with a page. You should start to see that roll out in the coming weeks.

Improved observability: This quarter, we’re working on improving visibility with updates to the workflow runs tab. This project will make it easier for users to understand what their app is doing. In this case, that’s by showing logs at a workflow level.

Editor modernization:

  • Menubar: The team is doing some foundational work to reconfigure the editor menubar. These updates will improve the overall look, feel, and navigation experience.

  • Workflow tab updates: We’re also making excellent progress on a major revamp of the workflow tab. One of the benefits is that it will be easier to manage a page with large amounts of workflows. We’ll let you know soon when this update will be available to users.

Workload management:

  • App metrics improvements (coming in August): We’re making several small improvements to the pie chart on the app metrics tab. Soon, you’ll be able to see how many times each type of activity has occurred, in addition to the total number of workload units (WU) the activity has consumed and its percent of overall WU. This will make it easier for you to optimize your app’s workload consumption.

Legacy plan migration: Important reminder! The 18-month legacy period for capacity-based plans ends October 1, 2024. If you have one or more apps on a legacy plan, you’ll receive an email reminder and some helpful resources ahead of the migration. In the meantime, you can use this roundup of workload tools and tips to understand, track, and optimize your app’s workload usage.

AI: Thanks again for all of your great feedback on the AI page builder we rolled out a month ago. We’re using that momentum to make the tool even more flexible. The team is also beginning usability testing on a new AI generation feature that would allow you to customize your UI much more than the current page designer.Until then, tag @bubble on X or @bubble__hq on Instagram and show us your creations.

Mobile: The team is still making progress on the roadmap timeline we shared in June. In July, Bubble Ambassadors got early access to the private alpha. They’ve given us some great feedback that we’re working on incorporating.

Updates from the Content and Community teams

  • Gregory John’s newest YouTube course on integrating with Stripe is live! He’ll be hosting an “office hours” session Wednesday, August 21. Leave your questions on the video and RSVP here to get a reminder.

  • It’s been a year since Bubble launched the developer certification exam. We took a look at what’s changed and shared a few areas to study up on if you’re planning on getting certified.

  • We recently published a new article series on transitioning to Bubble from traditional coding, including JavaScript and SQL. Thanks to @petter for all his help working on these.

  • Coming soon: A new course all about WU, launching mid-August. Subscribe to the Bubble YouTube channel to get notified when it drops.

  • If you’ve ever wanted to get involved in shaping Bubble’s features, you can now join the Bubble Early Testing Advisory (BETA). Read more about the launch on the forum.

  • The research team just shared a behind-the-scenes look at how Bubble conducts user research and testing on the blog.

New hires

We had two new team members join us this month! Welcome to Lara, a new senior software engineer, and Caroline, a new technical product support specialist.

Thanks again to everyone who tuned in to the Product Sesh — I’m really looking forward to doing more events like this in the future.

Allen

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Merry Christmas everyone!

Great updates this month, looking forward to next quarter! Thanks to the entire team :slight_smile:

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Single most important thing I’ve been waiting for last three years. We need improved lighthouse score for mobile for better SEO.

@allenyang Will there be significant improvements in Lighthouse score?

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Really a life saver for lots of people.

Can not wait to see this roll out.

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Just to clarify: Is this for editor or our apps? Since your previous paragraph was about editor, so wondering.

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If you guys can do this quarterly, this will help me keep track of the seasons and time of year better.

Looking forward to seeing improved page load speeds

Could you guys remove the function that removes from the URL browser history every time we change tabs in the editor? In the past I was able to use my browser back button to quickly go back to where I was in the editor.

I hope the team is ready and has made it so our plans will switch at the end of our billing months and it is not just a mass switch on October 1, in order to avoid lots of extra charges. As per bubble policy, if we switch before the end of our billing month, we get charged for the WUs consumed in the month prior to having switched.

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A couple folks have asked about the upcoming LeanJS project - that is indeed about page load speeds on run-mode, not edit-mode.

It’s hard to predict how much that will directly help Lighthouse scores because the impact varies depending on what’s on the page. This, alone, is not the only piece of the page load performance puzzle - there’s more work we want to do towards this in the future!

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It’s been 16 months since you announced the switch to WU and the only WU related features you’ve given us are a kill switch and some email notifications. I hope you got some surprises for us before the switch over date.

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So is Bubble’s Native Mobile Beta Release still on track for launch at the beginning of Q4?

So excited!

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js ecosystem is full of homonyms, can you give more details about what you are implementing? are you referring to this project?

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I tend to agree. Lot of bugs not yet resolved. Not yet easy to debug WU consumptions on front-end and other workflows. List operations, search restrictions etc. many such issues are there which will cause us high WU consumptions but are unaddressed yet.

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With the bugs, undocumented items we are charged for that aren’t listed anywhere, and still countless WU issues even as of the last 30 days being pointed out you guys are still forcing a migration in October? Does that really seem wise?

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What can we put on the page to make it load faster?

Will static pages load faster when the user is logged out?

If not, can bubble allow services like pre-render, Wordpress/ghost installation on sub folders or any alternative solution?

Fast loading blog pages are essential for SEO and traffic.

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It’s more what can’t you put on the page :slight_smile:

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I’m very excited about changes happening at Bubble. Makes me feel optimistic about future. :star_struck:

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Thanks, @allenyang . Super disappointing to hear that returning back end data to the front end is not a priority. Right now the separation between these two make working in Bubble extremely clunky. Not just with data, but even the editor’s experience. Any time you work on a backend workflow, it’s two clicks back to the design tab of your page, and then entire design tab is reset.

More generally, I hope you guys realize that building AI apps is going to be the next big thing and build your roadmap around that accordingly. Short term, this means native JSON field types and native JSON parsing; long-term, native video recording/websockets.

Thanks for the team’s hard work!

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You can already sticky the property editor. Look in the menu bar, i think it’s in View.

What kind of AI integration for builders are you talking about? I personally think there’s enough AI-ism.

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Thanks for the tip about stickying the property editor. This setting being hidden in the “View” tab probably means most users don’t know about it.

I didn’t say anything about an AI integration for builders. I don’t think the AI features are very useful at present, nor do I think anyone other than extreme novices care about them. As I said in my post, I’m referring to better handling of JSON (and more generally Interoperability with AI outputs). Right now you can only store data in a few formats (text, UNIX date, etc.), JSON isn’t one of them. If an AI API sends you back a JSON object in a field, you have to use plugins to parse it, or manually parse it with regex, which is ridiculous. Or lets say you want to use embeddings, an extremely common use case in AI, you need to store it in a third party vector database. In the future with multimodal models becoming ubiquitous, we’re going to need a way to connect audio/video to these APIs using websockets. Right now there’s zero native support for websockets.

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You can do it by calling your own backend workflow with no plugins other than native API Connector. Yeah a workaround but you don’t need plugins or regex :slight_smile:

This will never change. Third party vector DBs work well and can be integrated easily using the API. Don’t expect Bubble to invest time in it when their own DB is orders of magnitude slower for CRUD.

That’s what plug-ins are for. It’s not reasonable to expect Bubble to be able to support every use case exceptionally well. It’s a broad platform.

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You are so funny and helpful George :joy:

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