Hi all,
This is our July community update! Read last month’s update here.
We had two big events this month:
First, the launch of New Responsive into wide release! From reaching #5 Product of the Day on Product Hunt to having so many of you tune in for our first ever Livestream launch, it’s been incredible to hear such amazing feedback on the new features the team has been working on. We’re going to be continuing to work hard to deliver more improvements building off this milestone.
Also, don’t forget a cool way to learn the new responsive controls is to play our Bubble Bird Game (a downloadable template puzzle game we created internally to learn the new Responsive containers and layout controls in the editor).
Second, Immerse Demo Day - congratulations to the two winners of our Demo Day: Eissra Eltom, founder of Verve (winner of Best Pitch), and Lisa Michelle, founder of Bridesquad (winner of Best Product & Fan Favorite) and the finalists Dominic Mensah and Michael Derard, and a huge shoutout to entire fourth cohort of Immerse for some of the most impressive, innovative Bubble apps to date!
We also welcomed some new faces to the team:
- Rachel, joining us as an account executive
- Molly, joining us as an engineer
- Isabelle, joining as an engineering intern for the summer
If you’d like to join us, our open roles can be found here. We always value previous Bubble experience when hiring, particularly for our Technical Product Support Specialist role.
Changes we made this month
In preparation for the launch of New Responsive, we added two new features:
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The ability to control padding via Styles
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Data sources to access an element’s width and height to make it easy to construct conditional formatting based on the size of a parent container (or other element)
Another formatting change we released was separating font and font-weight into distinct properties, as part of our work towards a component system.
We also did some notable bug fix and reliability work, including:
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A fix to our version control algorithm so that when elements are added, deleted, or moved on multiple branches, we group the relevant conflicts together into a single, top-level conflict, which makes it easier to resolve the conflicts in a consistent way and avoids weird issues with elements disappearing from the elements tree or the editor on merges.
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A fix to our Magic Link feature to avoid email scanners breaking the links we send
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A change to the way we parse dates on the server to make it more consistent with the way we parse dates in the browser
Finally, we’ve been making various improvements to the editor’s management of upgrading and downgrading plans, including the changes to the flow for when you try to use a feature that your plan does not support to make it clearer what’s going on and easier to upgrade.
This month in numbers
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New conversations via bug reports or support@bubble.io: 8,709 (down 4.3%).
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Average first response time to messages: 1h 58m during business hours (down 14.9%)
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Average response time to messages: 2h 02m during business hours (down 18.1%)
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Tickets closed by the engineering team in the past 30 days: 121
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Average days to closure for tickets closed by the engineering team: 19.9 days
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Average days to closure for high priority tickets: 6.8 days
Things on our minds
We continued to push on reliability, following up on the issues from last month. We had a few more incidents where we had to rollback or fix-forward deployed code because of impact on production applications, but compared to last month, the issues affected a much smaller percentage of our userbase, in part because of additional precautions we have been taking. We are still working on building discipline around some of the process changes that came out of last month’s retrospective, and instilling them so that they are automatic parts of our culture.
What we’re currently working on
Following up on our latest post about pricing, we are continuing to do technical investigation work on capacity and auto-scaling. As mentioned in that post, we intend to do further rounds of community feedback once we have completed the technical investigation work, and do not anticipate releasing anything disruptive that would jeopardize anyone’s ability to build on Bubble.
Other ongoing workstreams:
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We released an experimental feature to optimize performance for pages with lots of invisible elements last month. We are now working towards releasing it to everyone, since early testers gave very positive feedback about the performance improvements.
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We are working on an overhaul of the flow for creating a new account with Bubble to make it cleaner and more intuitive.
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Our work on an improved version control interface continues: we are finalizing designs and breaking out engineering tickets.
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We are finished testing changes to the way we generate HTML, and plan to release it this month, likely as an experimental feature. This will be an intermediary release that will still involve on-the-fly generation of the HTML, but will lead to significant performance improvements and pave the way for future work. We are likely not going to immediately follow this up with pushing toward generating HTML and CSS on the server, because we’ve identified a few technical prerequisites that we want to work on first, but we do expect this release to be worthwhile in its own right, and down the line we do plan to return to generating HTML and CSS server-side once we have made the necessary infrastructure investments.
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We are in the final stages of testing for performance optimizations to make bulk data manipulation via backend workflows faster.
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For the overhaul of our network architecture and infrastructure, we are starting with improving our credentials and configuration management to make it more scalable and more secure.
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In order to increase our overall reliability, we are working on the way our alerting and observability systems work, so that we can be more proactive about tackling impending problems. As part of this work, we recently released some internal changes to direct errors to the right team more efficiently
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We are actively working on our project to improve how easy and fast it is to build beautiful apps on Bubble. The project involves improvements to managing colors and fonts across the app, and a replacement of our under-used element templates feature with a more mature component system. This workstream led to the release mentioned above of splitting font and font-weight apart, and we expect more releases in July.
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Our push to migrate code of CoffeeScript continues; we are now down to 35.8% CoffeeScript in our main codebase.
To our American friends, happy Fourth of July, and to everyone else: have a great weekend!!
Josh and Emmanuel
Thank you as always for these updates Josh - very nice to see these
Are you saying Bubble’s language tab / feature set doesn’t cover your use case? If not, what’s it missing?