Hi all,
This is our November community update! Read last month’s update here.
Of course, the most exciting part of October was BubbleCon, our first-ever user conference. I had an absolutely amazing time, especially putting faces to names for so many members of the Bubble community (and learning new names!). I was blown away by how many people flew in from all over the world or joined us online, and the friendly, community ethos was incredible. I’m genuinely thrilled about what lies ahead, and we can’t wait to continue to shape the future of technology together.
If you missed it or just want to relive the magic, you can watch a replay of every single session. That includes the keynote that Emmanuel and I presented, where we shared some very exciting things to come. Speaking of which …
Highlights from the BubbleCon 2023 keynote
I hope you’ll take the time to watch the full replay or read an in-depth recap of our keynote here. But for now, here’s a quick list of the roadmap updates we announced:
- Native mobile: You read that right. We’re setting out to make Bubble the default no-code platform for not just web apps, but native mobile apps too. Stay tuned for updates by joining the waitlist.
- AI-powered design: AI and no-code are a match made in heaven, because both exist to make software easier to create. We’re bringing AI into the Bubble editor so you can kickstart full-fledged apps from scratch just by describing what you want.
- Bulk data operations: We’re committed to making data processing at scale faster and more efficient. New bulk operations will let you run backend workflows on millions of things reliably and cost-effectively.
- A revamped expression composer: Many of you have previewed this feature because it’s currently in beta. The goal is to make building on Bubble even more flexible and easy to use with simpler editing, automatic parentheses, and better keyboard controls.
- Returning data from custom events: Soon, you’ll be able to add one or more fields to each custom event indicating the names and types of data it can return. The result is cleaner workflow tabs that make apps easier to maintain and organize.
For more, you can also check out the replay of VP of Product Allen Yang’s fireside chat on our product roadmap here.
Changes we made this month
Speaking of bulk data manipulation, we rolled out a change that increased the scalability of “Schedule API workflow on a list” by ~10x! We also shipped an improvement that makes it much faster to switch between the editor’s tabs — especially if you have a complex app.
In response to your feedback, we’ve simplified our bug report form. We’re exploring further ways to improve it, too, since we know overhead in submitting bugs is a pain point.
Enterprise customers on dedicated instances now have the option to disable Bubble employee login into their dedicated box. This was a request we heard from some of our largest customers, and strengthening our data privacy and security is an ongoing effort.
The Bubble Developer Certification is now available to everyone; no more waitlist! Register to take the exam here if you haven’t yet.
Finally, our marketing team launched a new homepage design on bubble.io as part of a larger, ongoing effort to refresh our website — we hope you like it!
What we’re working on
As Allen outlined in his fireside chat at BubbleCon, our product roadmap’s big bets are made possible by our core technology, which is why we’re reinforcing our foundation in Q4 and beyond. Currently, we’re working on:
- Rolling out an improved test framework that makes it much easier for us to create and debug automated tests
- Continuing to build automated tests that make sure our most important features have good coverage
- Memory leak–detection and analysis tools in the editor
- Breaking services off our monolith to make them independently deployable and observable
- Error boundaries in the editor, which help ensure that if there’s a bug, it’s contained to a single component with clear feedback — making the editor less glitchy
The team is also elbow-deep in work on the new expression composer beta, continuing to fix bugs and refine the experience based on your feedback. In particular, we heard you when you told us you strongly prefer parentheses over brackets, so we’re finalizing a new design treatment that should roll out soon. We’re excited to see more and more people toggling this on and trying it out.
The AI team is improving our model’s ability to generate responsive page designs, and we’ll start usability testing soon. And the native mobile team has broken ground on foundational engineering work (reminder to sign up for the waitlist to get updates and early access!)
The team is making progress on improving “delete a list of things,” and we hope you’ll see a noticeable difference in scalability very soon, plus with enhancements to the log it generates. This team is also working on performance improvements to uploading CSVs of data.
Our onboarding team is running a new experiment where new users can tell us a few key features they want to build into their apps, and then we generate a custom starter template for them based on those features.
And some other projects that are still ongoing without any major updates just yet:
- As we phase out all the ways apps were impacted by capacity limits, we’re making a change to keep you from incurring workload for partially executed actions
- The team is building out the ability to create, edit, and delete a custom set of design breakpoints in an app
- The styles tab is getting a new look and feel, improved search of element styles, a new ability to edit styles from styles list, and better organization and grouping of element types
- The team is switching Bubble over to a more modern JavaScript bundler, which will lead to across-the-board improvements to page load speed
- We’re refining our AI-powered RFP spam detector, designed to cut down on noise so that agencies and prospective clients can find one another more easily
Finally, we know some of you love watching the countdown of the remaining CoffeeScript in our main codebase! (#ASMR) Well, we just hit zero! We’ll be drinking lattes to celebrate.
Other updates
Plugin creators, friendly reminder that you have until the end of year to update any plugins with server-side actions to Plugin API v4. This update is simple (it just involves you swapping some syntax; check out the update guide), but if you don’t update them in time, your plugins will break — and any Bubble apps using those plugins will break, too. End-users will start seeing notifications in late November about any plugins that haven’t been updated, and unupdated plugins will be delisted from the marketplace until they’re fixed.
Also, major congratulations to our Immerse Demo Day winners:
- Best Pitch winner: Vaish Srivathsan, founder of Simili
- Best Product winner: Ana Saldaña, founder of Moolli
- Community Favorite winner: Deb Shelby, founder of DART Command Central
And to our 2023 BubbleCon “Bubble For Good” Hackathon winners!
- Bubble Rookies winner: Aanya S. (who is only 14 years old!), whose app empowers people to contribute donations to charities fulfilled by local street vendors
- Bubble Veterans winner: Daniel N., whose app is an AI-powered sous chef that suggests healthy recipes based on people’s preferences
- Professional Bubble Developers winner: Daryl J., whose app conducts mental health check-ins for kids and teens
Team news
We had three new team members join in October: Ally joining us as a senior software engineer; Kelsey joining us as a finance and business operations lead; and Becky joining us as a senior product marketing manager.
And if you missed them, be sure to check out Bubble Developer Andrew Vernon’s personal story and top Bubble advice on the blog, as well as why Director of Founder Inclusion Nichole Bestman believes the future of no-code is bright.
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As you can see, it was a big month for the Bubble team, and we couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds. Thank you for reading, don’t forget to check out the BubbleCon replays, and we’ll see you back here next month!
Wishing you a fantastic November,
Josh and Emmanuel
I thought this update allows dedicated to disable that. Or do you mean that even if support had access limited on shared the engineers would technically still be able to access it?
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