Hi all,
This is the latest in our series of monthly community updates (Here’s the previous one).
This month was mostly focused on heads-down, tactical execution for us: a lot of incremental but important progress, a few key releases and milestones, and some new faces on the team.
Changes we made this month
We rolled out another major milestone in our efforts to make Bubble fast and scalable: we can now arbitrarily scale out server capacity on our main Bubble cluster. We’ve taken advantage of this to increase our total size and optimize user-facing capacity, which has been led to some noticeable speed-ups for common operations. For instance, for an app on the professional plan with no additional capacity, loading a list of 100 results from the iTunes API via our servers went from taking around 600 ms to taking around 200 ms. We’re also seeing that total capacity usage by all our apps went down on average by about 66% for an equivalent amount of usage. Given that we’ve been investing a bunch of engineering effort in building out our systems, it’s nice to see some quantitative impact.
It hasn’t been totally smooth sailing: the project that led to the above improvements also led to a major outage on the 23rd, where the main Bubble cluster was unavailable for over 5 minutes. But the bug that led to that outage is fixed and won’t happen again, whereas the performance gains are here to stay.
This isn’t the last of the performance and scalability wins: we’re working on a couple of follow-on projects that this unlocks, but it’s a nice milestone.
Also on the infrastructure front, we upgraded our LetsEncrypt implementation to the latest version of the ACME standard, which doesn’t have much user-facing benefits but was necessary to keep SSL working as they phased out the old version on their end.
In additional to our backend engineering, we also did some feature work:
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Our Figma imports feature was released for beta testing
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Same with our overhauled CSV uploading
We also continued to push on reliability and bug fixes; among other things, we moved the code that builds our responsive layouts off of the old, buggy indexer system and onto our new asset-generation system, which should eliminate a frequent source of disappearing elements in run-mode and was one of the major reasons version control merges sometimes resulted in corrupted apps.
We’ve also kept running our new system for having more engineers staffed on bug fixing and having them directly respond to customers, which we rolled out near the end of May. The results have been impressive in terms of numbers; we went from an average of 19 - 20 days for bug reports to be investigated by the engineering time to closer to 3 days.
In terms of outreach and resources for the community, we:
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published 19 new app of the day posts highlighting and promoting the great apps you all are building on us, as well as a post about our own story
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published a comprehensive guide to accelerator resources by city: surprisingly, we weren’t able to find a good resource for this, so decided to create our own
Finally, on the team front, we hired two new members of the customer success team (welcome Jessica, who started this week, and Carla, who starts later this month) as well as a Partnerships manager (Kim, starting later in the summer). And @cal on the engineering team switched from being a part-time intern to a full-time employee: excited to have him fully on board!
This month in numbers
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Total customers who reached out to us through bug reports or support@bubble.io: 1,522 (0% difference from last 30 days)
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Total received messages: 2,852 (up 2% from last 30 days)
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Average response time to messages (5h 29m counting only our work hours; 12h 38m in absolute terms)
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Total bug reports: 585 (down 16% from last month)
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Time to resolve bug reports escalated to the engineering team: for bugs resolved in the last 4 weeks, it took on average 2.3 days for engineers to investigate and deploy a fix or find a workaround for the customer.
Things on our minds
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We’ve been very happy with the initial uptake of our bootcamp program: we’ve sold over 150 tickets, and the first two cohorts completed their courses last week. It demonstrates the value of having a live human help someone new to the no-code space over some of the initial hurdles, and we’re planning on continuing to invest in this going forward.
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We’re still very much pushing on the stability theme we’ve mentioned in the last couple updates. We’re past the initial stages of reorienting and putting resources against it, and now into the day-to-day grind of fixing bugs, prioritizing stability-related projects, and otherwise investing in it. We’re still not happy with the state of our version control feature, although some of the releases this month we believe have reduced (though not eliminated) many of the bugs with it, and plan to continue doing work on it this month.
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With the recent protests in New York and across the world, we’ve been very conscious of the Black Lives Matter movement, and have been thinking about what our contribution should be as a company to making a more inclusive world. Our thinking is that we should double-down on our mission to make technology more accessible, and focus on what we bring to the table, which is lowering the barriers for people to participate. We’d like to do more to help people from underrepresented groups succeed in Tech, and we have some things we’re working on that we’ll hopefully be able to announce in the next month or two
What we’re currently working on
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On the performance and scalability front, we’ve now completed about 60% of our project to seamlessly transfer apps between databases in our main cluster without causing disruption to the app, which was in the planning stage as of last update.
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We’re continuing to work on the transition to our new asset-building system for doing calculations on top of application data. The goal for the next couple weeks is to transition over the issue checker, which would allow us to run it on the server instead of in the editor browser window, which we expect to be a major win for editor performance. We continue to see this project as critical path for resolving some of the bugs with our version control feature.
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Our Google Optimize integration is almost ready to enter beta-testing
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We’re building out internal metrics on reliability to help us track our progress over time and pinpoint where the most impactful work to be done is.
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We’re in the final testing stages on our overhaul of the code that powers the Input element, which should lead to increased reliability, and better behavior on Android.
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The redesign of our homepage is mostly done and will likely be rolled out this month
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We’re working with our legal team to revise our terms to lower the minimum age for using Bubble to 13 (with parental consent).
The two big multi-month projects we’ve been working on are still ongoing:
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The complete redesign of our editor is making steady progress: we’ve finished the Design tab and Settings tab, and are mostly done with the Workflow tab.
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We’re doing a ground up overhaul of all our educational and reference content, including the reference, manual, and video tutorials.
Finally, on the team front, in addition to Jessica and Carla, our goal is to hire a 3rd new member of the success team this month. We’re also actively searching for Growth Managers.
Thank you to everyone in our community – we’re always incredibly grateful for everything you put into the platform, and look forward to seeing all the stuff you build this month!
– Josh and Emmanuel
all around. Thanks for the transparency and sharing the roadmap.
