Hi all,
This is our December community update! Read last month’s update here.
After a fairly planning-heavy October with our company get-together, November was much more heads-down, and we had a number of launches and substantial behind-the-scenes progress. It was also a good month for hiring: we welcomed a number of people into important open roles. Those include:
- Daniel, joining us as our Director of Community. He’s already in the thick of things (he attended our in-person NY meetup in October even before his official start date) and I expect you will hear more from him soon!
- Marcin, joining us as our first IT Support Manager, helping us level up our internal processes
- Laura, joining us as a Lead Product Manager
- Peter, joining us as our first and Lead User Researcher
- Eve, leading our visual design and branding efforts
As always, open roles can be found here, and we especially encourage community members with solid Bubble skills and a love for helping people to join us as Technical Product Support Specialists
Changes we made this month
Our biggest release this month was the launch of our Component Library, which is a significant upgrade to how fast it is to build a well-designed Bubble app from scratch. We’re currently collecting user feedback on it: the biggest ask so far is for user-designed components, which is something we would like to do, although we are still deciding how soon to prioritize working on it.
We are also excited to announce an official Weglot plugin to make it significantly easier to build multi-lingual Bubble apps.
We also cleaned up a long-standing pain point around displaying multiple popups to make it simpler and more predictable how popups will be layered on top of each other.
Behind the scenes, we launched a major overhaul to our internal deployment pipeline, which should make it much easier for us to make future infrastructure changes by making it simpler to add and remove pieces to our deployment flow.
This month in numbers
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New conversations via bug reports or support@bubble.io: 13,364 (up 16.9%).
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Average first response time to messages: 1h 57m during business hours (up 34.9%)
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Average response time to messages: 2h 03m during business hours (up 27.3%)
We are skipping reporting on metrics for tickets closed by the engineering team this month because we just transitioned our tracking system from ClickUp to Jira and don’t have our metrics fully configured yet.
Things on our minds
We had an outage yesterday that we are very disappointed by, because we did not do an adequate job keeping the community informed about our response. We did not update our status page to indicate that there was a serious issue while we were working on fixing it, which is not acceptable, since our users rely on our platform being available and need to know that if there are any issues, we are aware of them and working towards resolving them. We are in the middle of an internal postmortem, and plan to share the results with the community. Our preliminary response was here, and will be updated once we are finished with the postmortem.
Because of that, and another smaller issue yesterday with our homepage displaying the refresh banner, the last 24 hours have been tough on our support team. We’d like to extend a huge thank you to them for getting back on top of the pile of bug reports, and a huge thank you to all of you for your patience in submitting reports and waiting for us to respond. We are still working through some open issues with the engineering team, but we think our systems are now working normally across the board and the open issues are specific to individual applications.
On a broader note, there’s been some leadership shifts on our team. Most relevantly, I am going to shift more of my responsibilities around running the overall company over to Emmanuel, and take over direct, personal leadership of the engineering team. I am very excited to do this, because I think we have a lot of opportunities to up our game in terms of delivering useful features to the community more frequently while doing a better job of maintaining platform stability. I intend to make a number of fast changes, including taking a hard look at how we manage production incidents and communications around them, and while I don’t expect you all will notice results immediately, I am eager to get the ball rolling.
What we’re currently working on
Following up on our latest post about pricing, we are continuing to do technical work on capacity and auto-scaling. We are working towards an interim release that will not make any changes to the way we price Bubble, but will expose the ability to chart and manage your app’s usage over time, so that we can start previewing what an auto-scaling / usage-based approach to pricing might look instead of the hard capacity caps we have today.
Other ongoing workstreams:
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We are working on the ability to define custom font and color variables on our Styles tab. We have a version built and undergoing internal testing.
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Our work on an improved version control interface continues: we are aiming to start user testing mid-December.
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We are continuing to work on our overhaul of our infrastructure, including the deployment pipeline changes mentioned above.
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Our push to migrate code of CoffeeScript continues; we are now down to 4.7% CoffeeScript in our main codebase. Typescript is now up to 7.6%, with the remainder being Javascript.
Thank you for all your support,
Josh and Emmanuel
