Hi all,
This is the latest in our series of monthly community updates. You can read last month’s update here.
Emmanuel and I have been a little out of the loop this month: both of us welcomed baby girls into our families! We swear we didn’t coordinate the timing. Anyway, for almost all of February, one or the other of us has been out or working part time (I won’t be fully back til mid-March). So this was a good stress test of the team’s ability to run on its own, and I would say we passed with flying colors. Important projects got shipped, the level of service we delivered remained consistent with past months, and our day-to-day operations continued smoothly. Given that we’re now a 36 person company, that’s to be expected, but it still highlights how much has changed at Bubble over the last year. We’re both very happy watching the Bubble team and our new babies grow!
Changes we made this month
This was an exciting month: several things we’ve been working on for a long time finally went live! Highlights include:
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We have now officially launched our Zapier integration
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We finished the project to split the main cluster into an Immediate and Scheduled release tier
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We updated our written documentation to consolidate our reference and manual into a single document. The consolidated document is now live, and we’ll be updating the in-editor links to point to it instead of to the old reference.
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We finished our internal CRM to help our Success team provide better support. Our email response times have been 25% faster this month: I don’t think this is solely due to the new CRM (we’ve also hired some great people onto the team lately), but it certainly helped!
In addition to the big project completions, we’ve been busy on a number of other fronts:
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We rolled out a change to our free plan pricing. Thanks for all the feedback and commentary on the thread, it’s very helpful for us. We’re currently monitoring the numbers to see if this helps us hit the goal of keeping Bubble accessible while still supporting the growth of the platform: preliminary results are showing that this is an improvement from before.
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We kicked off the first Immerse cohort of 2021. We’re very excited to introduce the sixteen Black and POC founders working on amazing companies!
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We added 9 new posts to our App of the Day series
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We’ve continued expanding our Quick Tips video series with more short videos
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Finally, for users of Atlassian Statuspage, Bubble is now available as a 3rd party component – thanks @johnny for the suggestion!
On the team front, we’re excited to welcome two new people, Lexi who is joining us as a designer, and Vincent who is joining our Growth team!
This month in numbers
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Total number of conversations via bug reports or support@bubble.io: 4,816 (up 2.4%)
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Total received messages: 7,833 (up 0.4%)
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Average response time to messages: (2h 34m during business hours, down 25%)
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Time to resolve bug reports escalated to the engineering team: the average lifespan of open bugs and bugs resolved in the last month is 6.7 days (up from 6.3)
Things on our minds
Reliability of the platform is still a major focus for us. We had a big win this month with the release of the Scheduled tier, which is exciting. We also had some more downtime caused by bugs introduced while working on this project: it’s been an extremely sensitive project since it touches our core logic around orchestrating servers, so any test case we miss can lead to a full system outage. Fortunately, the work here is mostly wrapped up, so this project should hopefully turn into a net reliability benefit rather than detriment from now on.
Speaking of improvement projects causing temporary reliability setbacks, we’ve had some issues with Dedicated environments over the last couple weeks due to work on our new asset management system. We’ve been in the final phases of rolling it out (which will let us, finally, go back to working on improving version control, which is still very buggy as a feature), and there’s been a few interactions between how that system works and how Dedicated environments are set up. We have some ideas to address the root cause of this that we’ll probably start work on later this month.
Another area we’ve been dealing with reliability challenges is our Rich Text Editor plugin. Rich text editing is a much harder problem than it looks on the surface, because we have to translate between the editor format and the format we store data internally in Bubble (we use bbcode behind the scenes as a security measure to prevent XSS attacks). We’ve had a steady stream of bug reports with our editor plugin, and have been looking into ways of improving the translation layer to make the feature much more stable.
What we’re currently working on
New initiatives:
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We are working on a replacement for our SelectPDF plugin. We would like to bring PDF generation in-house with a Bubble-built solution in order for us to fix some of the issues people have with it, and upgrade to a modern rendering engine. This is also an opportunity for us to build out some supporting infrastructure that will let us build certain kinds of microservices more efficiently in the future.
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We’re making some changes to the way we manage data about setting up custom domains that will make it easier and faster for us to debug issues that come up when a user points a custom domain at Bubble
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We’re working on improving our internal alerting and log management to help us detect and respond to bugs and issues faster.
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We’re working on adding more features to the v3 API of our Stripe plugin. Stripe is making changes on their end that will limit the ability to save and charge credit cards in version 2, so we want to make sure there’s a clean migration path onto version 3 for plugin users.
Updates on our ongoing initiatives:
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We’re adding two new bootcamp programs, one aimed at Bubble newbies who want to develop general development skills without having a specific product in mind, and one aimed at experienced Bubble users who want to build apps for a living. We have the descriptions of the new programs up on our website, and are hoping to open bookings shortly.
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We’re working on a small set of features around keyboard and mouse handling to make it easier to build game-like or interactive UIs that rely on mouse or keyboard input. This should be going live in the next week or two.
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We’re changing the backend used for the Logs → Server Logs tab of the editor. We’ve built out the new backend and are now testing and refining it.
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Our responsive overhaul continues: we finished building the new set of responsive controls, and are now polishing the design to make sure the UX is friendly.
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Moving more of our asset-building to the new system: we’ve finished building all the new asset generation code, and are now just working through a final set of bugs before we’re ready to move on to work on version control.
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The complete redesign of our editor is now on the second round of internal QA: we fixed all the issues identified in the first round, and are now working on a list of issues from the second round.
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Hiring: we are actively looking for roles across all aspects of the business. In particular, we’re looking for an EU-based person with previous Bubble experience to join the Success team: if that describes you and you’d like a job with us, please apply!
Here’s to a happy and productive March,
Josh and Emmanuel
Thanks 
New baby girls, the future Bubblers!
Thanks you guys! So glad I don’t have to worry about this sort of thing. That’s why I love using the Bubble plugin. You always make it easy to use as well as updated and secure.
type element. That would be awesome!