Monthly Community Update -- January 2023

Announcements
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Hi all,

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first monthly community update of 2023! Sorry this one is a few days late. Read last month’s update here.

December is generally a slower month for us with a lot of the team taking time off for the holidays, but we still managed to squeeze in a number of small launches. In general, the team is pretty hungry to increase the volume of user-facing features we ship: we’re hoping that becomes a major theme for 2023!

We also added two new faces:

  • Gina, joining to lead our Growth Marketing team
  • Rahul, joining the Success team as a Technical Product Support Specialist

If you’re interested in joining us, one of the things we shipped in December was an overhauled careers page: check it out! We always 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

We made a number of additions to the product:

We’re also proud to announce the launch of an official plugin for Sparklite, which lets you build complex calculations in spreadsheets and convert into APIs without writing any code.

We also launched two new educational resources that we’re very excited about:

This month in numbers

  • Total new conversations with our support team: 11,951

  • Average tier 1 (FAQs, account and billing issues) reply time: 35 minutes

  • Average tier 2 (app development questions and bug reports) reply time: 3 hours and 5 minutes

  • Tickets closed by the engineering team: 102

  • Average days to closure by engineering for high priority tickets: 2.1

  • Average days to closure by engineering for all tickets: 7.4

Things on our minds

Following up on some of the reliability topics discussed in last month’s updates, we’ve been investing in how we handle production support:

  • We have an accepted offer for another Cloud Engineer to join our platform team

  • We’ve trained our 24/7 support team on emergency escalation procedures

In general, we’ve made a bunch of changes on the engineering team aimed at increasing the rate at which we ship features as well as better platform support and stability, including a team reorganization. As mentioned in last update, the impact of the changes probably will not become immediately apparent, but our hope is by mid-year the community is seeing a very noticeable difference in how fast we move and how well we maintain platform stability.

What we’re currently working on

Projects we have in flight include:

  • Our work on an improved version control interface has entered the user-testing phase!

  • We are fleshing out the next set of visual design feature improvements, which are likely going to include a mix of smaller editor UX improvements as well as some bigger potential projects such as a table element and user generated components: more details to come

  • 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.

  • We are continuing to work on our overhaul of our infrastructure, with the goals of enabling SOC2 certification, improving security and uptime, and eventually expanding globally (still no definite ETA on global expansion)

  • Our push to migrate code of CoffeeScript continues; we are now down to 3.1% CoffeeScript in our main codebase. Typescript is now up to 8.7%, with the remainder being Javascript.

Hope your 2023 is off to a great start,

Josh and Emmanuel

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Thanks for the update, @josh! I always look forward to these :blush:

Keep up the great work!

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Looking forward to the new version control interface. Would be helpful.

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Would it be possible already to share more details on this?
Is it servers everywhere? Localization of the editor? Offices in other countries? Something else?
Thanks :blush:

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This and Part 1 of the Getting Started course should be required viewing before posting to the forum. Really nice work on those!

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HYPED

@josh what happened to improvements to database infrastructure and page load speed/Server-side rendering? Stopped mentioning those the past few updates.

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And the backend bulk data manipulation improvements from August

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Table element <3

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Lots of great progress - look forward to hearing more on the user-generated components!

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Allowing hosting outside the US for a lower price-point than Dedicated. (This is very popular request especially from European users). Again, though, to manage expectations, we don’t have a concrete timeline here – this technical work is about laying the groundwork to make that even a possibility.

Page load speed / server-side rendering is on the agenda for this year, but we want to make more progress on typification first, because some of the changes we want to make will be much safer and faster to make with better typing in place. Data query speed is also on the agenda, though probably prioritized below initial page load speed (that said, we actually released some improvements this week that speed up loading lots of query results if the query is unsorted or sorted by unique id).

Unfortunately, the technical approach we took ran into some issues, and we eventually gave up on it (we released some minor improvements, but nothing transformative enough to really brag about). We will revisit at some point but it’s not on the short-term docket.

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Great to know :muscle: (didn’t see the post about it).

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the ability to have an element match the dimensions of another element would be great. accessible via conditions

“when this group is visible”

width____________(blue dynamic expression text to select the element we want to match, or a dropdown off elements on the page)'s width

as well as fit width to contents for groupfocus elements.

thanks!

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Thanks to all of the bubble - Team!
Have to try some of the features. as the Pinterest style list for heterogenous heights of cells, in my case a list of administrating listed selling objects, right next to bought/ sold ones. They should then eliminate the „gaps“ in desktop views, as by now the sold/bought objects incorporate a little more height in the cell, than the others in the list.

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Is there any idea of when this might actually be released?

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thanks @josh. Do you have thoughts on bubble’s native wrapper? I see it’s (by far) the most requested feature.

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I was talking to someone on the team yesterday, it’s not close. They have other things to look at first. In guessing 2024 honestly.

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@josh did you share the methodology and/or data you used to determine this?
I’m curious how Bubble thinks of this, what tools you use, etc. Would be very handy with my customers.

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Just my two cents on this – My company has been working to develop native apps (we’ve been a custom cloud software company writing PHP/MySQL/Javascript apps for 10 years)… I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to do this. I know there are some smart folks on here who have found some cool workarounds… but what I’ve seen so far is there are some weird paradigms with true native apps… Like how CoreData works w/ iOS, for instance. I don’t envy the task Bubble has here… Swift, as “simplified” as it is now, is still pretty complex.

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Hi Josh,

Has there been any progress with document/PDF creation? I think this would be a huge draw to the platform. Something with headers, footers, page breaks, ect. A template we could use to create nicely formatted PDFs.

Thanks!