Hi all,
This is our July community update! Read last month’s update here.
We shipped a number of small platform improvements this month (detailed below), but the most exciting changes here at Bubble were those shared at our inaugural Bubble Developer Summit. Last week, we celebrated our community of professional Bubble Developers and announced the launch of several new programs, including the long-awaited Bubble Developer Certification, agency tiers to help folks sort through the agency directory, and more. You can watch a replay or read a recap of the event here.
Over the course of June, we welcomed ten new teammates and six interns!
- Steve, joining us as a lead product manager
- Aster, Kyle, and Merlin, joining us as experienced software engineers
- Jason, joining as a software engineer
- Henry, Eduara, and Riya, joining our success team
- Jayvee, joining us as our director of community
- Anthony, joining as a senior accountant
- Rania, Harry, Nevil, Kelly, Karly, and LJ, joining us as interns.
If you’d like to join us, check out our careers page here. As always, we highly encourage community members with solid Bubble skills and a love for helping people to join us as Technical Product Support Specialists.
Finally, before I dive in, just a quick note to say that I’d love to hear any feedback you have on these monthly community posts. Leave a reply and let me know what else you might like to see me cover in the future.
Changes we made this month
We released Bubble Version 23, which includes tweaks to privacy rules that give you more control over the data your end-users see. Previously, there were certain situations when constructing expressions of the form “X’s Y’s Z” where users could see field Z based on a privacy rule given them access to X; they now also need explicit access to Y.
Last month, I mentioned we’d launched a public alpha for v4 of our API, which upgrades to Node 18 (AWS is planning to deprecate Node 14). That version is now officially released. If you manage a plugin that uses server-side actions, you’ll be required to migrate to v4 by January 4, 2023. (Here’s an update guide the team put together.)
Those connecting a login service using the OAuth 2.0 User-Agent flow can now add parameters (including optional ones) to the login redirect URL. This makes it possible to connect to some additional services that were previously incompatible with our API Connector.
We released three small improvements to editor usability:
- Previously, any time you uploaded a static image, Bubble defaulted to an aspect ratio of 1x1. Now, we’ll automatically set the aspect ratio to match the uploaded image itself.
- In the Data Tab, you’ll now see search fields for the Data Types, Privacy Rules, and Option Sets sub tabs. (Before, this was only available on the App Data tab previously.
- Merge captions for the API Connector are now more readable — something folks have been requesting for awhile now.
In addition to the usability improvements, keep an eye on the editor’s design – we’ve been cleaning it up and improving the look and feel!
We added three use case pages to our homepage, explaining Bubble’s value proposition for founders, enterprise, and developers. We hope these are helpful to you when sharing Bubble with friends, colleagues, and potential clients!
We also released two feature flags on the experimental settings panel that make exciting improvements to both editor and run-mode performance:
Finally, a quick note: Airtable recently announced they’re moving from API Keys to Personal Access Tokens this coming February, and you can switch over any time between now and then. We’ve updated the UI on the Airtable plugin to reflect that change, plus information on a few other requirements.
Whew!
This month in numbers
- Tier 1 (FAQs, account and billing issues) handled tickets: 5,685 (down from 6,095)
- Tier 2 (app development questions and bug reports) handled tickets: 2,593 (down from 2,773)
- Average tier 1 reply time: 26 minutes (down from 33 minutes)
- Average tier 2 reply time: 2 hours 11 minutes (up from 1 hour and 36 minutes)
- Tickets closed by the engineering team: 124 (up from 121)
- Average days to closure by engineering for high priority tickets: 6.9 (up from 5.4)
- Average days to closure by engineering for all tickets: 9.6 (up from 5.4)
- Incidents and regressions: 8 (down from 9)
- Of those, the number that are high-severity (greater than 20 bug reports): 1 (up from 0)
Things on our minds
Community
The Bubble community is something incredibly special, and we happened to do a lot of gathering this month that reminded us of that fact.
First, a few dozen Bubblers met up for a week of coworking together in Girona, Spain. It’s worth scrolling through the #BubbleHouse2023 tweets. It was really special to see folks from so many countries coming together and forming friendships over a shared love of Bubble’s platform.
Then, of course, there was the Bubble Developer Summit I mentioned above. I’ve never attended a virtual event with such an active chat before; you could barely read it, it was moving so fast. Personally, my favorite part was awarding our first-ever Bubble Developer Awards at the end — congrats to Renato Asse, Victor Nihoul, Wesley Wasielewski, and Thibault Marty! And, of course, our honorable mentions: Gregory John, Lachlan Kirkwood, Jose Campos Gonzalez, Gaby Roman, Zubair Lutfullah Kakakhel, Mike Loc, Neto Camarano, and JJ Englert. You can read more about the winners here.
We also announced that we’ll be holding an in-person (and virtual) conference for all Bubble users, BubbleCon, from October 24 to 25 in NYC. More to come soon, including exactly how many in-person tickets will be available, but save the date!
Editor stability
We’ve made a number of improvements and bug fixes to the editor over the last month, and we’re no longer receiving nearly as many reports of the editor being unusably buggy. That said, overall editor memory usage is still very much on our radar — we highly encourage checking out the experimental features mentioned above to get a preview of what we’re working on there. And we’re continuing to work on how we QA new features going out the door to avoid introducing too many new bugs, as well as circling back and fixing all the bugs and quality-of-life issues that users have reported.
WU, pricing, and affordability
We know optimizing WU is still top of mind for many of you. We just started a private beta for some updates to the App Metrics tab . They’re designed to make understanding WU consumption more straightforward via changes like better drilldowns into workflows and the ability to drill down per-minute for the last couple of days. We’re also working on better notifications if there are unusual spikes in workload usage to make it easier to monitor your app’s consumption (and we continue to work with users with unusual spikes of consumption on a case-by-case basis to support them).
We are also hard at work on features to make bulk data manipulation faster and more reliable, and we’ll be looking at the affordability of those features as part of our work there.
We’ve seen more and more users migrate to the new plans, and it’s great to see that for many users who switch, it is less expensive for them than their previous plans. We’re continuing to monitor and collect user feedback - thanks to everyone on their feedback thus far.
What we’re currently working on
- As mentioned above, we’re designing improved features for manipulating bulk data quickly and reliably.
- Building a table element (similar to a repeating group but can customize each column and header): This is officially in the hands of beta testers!
- Overhauling the dynamic expression composer to support mid-expression inserting, parentheses, etc.: We’re ramping up for the second phase of our alpha. As I mentioned last month, even if the feedback is positive, we do have more work to do before we can fully release it — we are in the process of integrating it with text fields, which is an important and tricky use-case.
- Adding properties to reusable elements, to make them much easier to customize and bring them closer to native elements in terms of capabilities: Quality assurance is underway as of last week.
- Single Sign-On (SSO) for larger organizations on Custom plans who want to let their team log in to the Bubble editor using their own identity provider: Also out for QA!
- Page load performance: We are midway through a project to radically reduce the time it takes to navigate between pages. This project will set up follow-on projects to speed up initial page load as well.
- SOC 2 certification: We’ve completed all the hard technical prerequisites and are now monitoring and auditing. If you are selling to larger enterprises who value this certification — or are a large enterprise customer yourself — please reach out to our sales team for updates on timeline!
- Improving our workload charts, including real-time reporting with by-the-minute data and deeper drill-downs (e.g., workload usage by specific actions inside a workflow). These are nearing the finish line. As mentioned above, we’ve started a private beta so we can make sure they’re as useful as possible before pushing them live for all apps.
- Moving off CoffeeScript and onto Typescript. We are now down to 1.1% CoffeeScript in our main codebase. Typescript is now up to 20%, with the remainder being Javascript.
Thank you all for your support, and wishing you a great July,
Josh and Emmanuel
