Monthly Community Update -- September 2023

Announcements
1

Hi all,

This is our September community update! Read last month’s update here.

A lot of exciting things happened in August, including the launch of reusable element properties, the public beta for a revamped expression composer, and the introduction of our sixth cohort of Immerse founders in residence. More about those things (and more) below.

Ticket sales for BubbleCon 2023, our first-ever user conference being held October 24–25, are also well underway. There are still a small number of tickets left to join us in person in NYC, but you can also register to join virtually, which is free. The virtual experience is going to be just as great, with networking opportunities, the ability to interact with live speakers, and more. That said, if you can’t make it, still register for a virtual ticket, because we’ll send you a recording later. Get a ticket here.

Changes we made this month

The team was especially excited to launch reusable element properties this month, which make it possible for a single reusable element to be repurposed in various ways. You can now choose to assign reusable elements dynamic data, including page-level data, so that they’re contextually aware. We’ve already heard from many users that this change has allowed them to drastically decrease the number of reusable elements they’re maintaining at any given time.

Another exciting launch this month was the public beta of our revamped expression composer. The changes let you do things like edit in the middle of an expression, manage order of operations more intuitively, and access dynamic data with your keyboard. We’ve gotten a lot of valuable feedback from this community already, which the team is taking into consideration as we work toward the feature’s full launch.

The team also released a feature that puts clickable labels on elements in the editor when they need data or workflows to function properly. The hope here is that these changes will make it easier to manage your elements and navigate between design and data or workflows. This change also appends a visual indicator to elements that have notes attached, with different colors to signal whether you’ve read the note or not.

Bubble’s user base is maturing and scaling every day, which is one of the reasons we’re working to improve the experience of managing bulk data. An exciting update here: The team more than doubled the speed of “Make changes to a list of things,” the action that modifies multiple entries in your app’s database. This is just the first of many improvements to bulk data manipulation to come — we’re doing a thorough audit of all our code in this area, optimizing everything we can, and identifying opportunities for larger rewrites and feature work.

To help you avoid unpleasant billing surprises, we also added new alerts to let you know if we’ve detected an anomalous spike in your app’s workload usage. Any time we notice that your app’s WU consumption is 5x the previous week’s average (or more), you’ll get an in-editor alert and an email.

Finally, we’ve rolled out data type categories in the expression composer’s dropdown as the default experience in the editor. Thanks to everyone who offered feedback here!

This month in numbers:

  • Tier 1 (FAQs, account and billing issues) handled tickets: 5,953
  • Tier 2 (app development questions and bug reports) handled tickets: 2,850
  • Average tier 1 reply time: 40 minutes
  • Average tier 2 reply time: 1 hour and 19 minutes
  • Tickets closed by the engineering team: 135
  • Average days to closure by engineering for high priority tickets: 5.3
  • Average days to closure by engineering for all tickets: 6.2
  • Incidents and regressions: 20
  • Of those, the number that are high-severity (greater than 20 bug reports): 2

What we’re currently working on

  • Making it faster and more reliable to manipulate bulk data: Next up on the team’s list is improving the performance of “Delete a list of things.”
  • Making reusable elements much easier to customize: The team is working on a feature that will make it much easier to copy and paste reusable elements across apps.
  • Improving page load performance: We’re currently working on switching Bubble over to a more modern JavaScript bundler, which will lead to across-the-board improvements to page load speed.
  • Improving the UX of the editor: Engineering work has started on making it possible to set custom breakpoints so you can control your design’s responsiveness to different screen sizes without relying on so many conditionals.
  • Creating a delightful onboarding experience: The team is planning an experiment that will offer starter templates to users in the onboarding experience to give them a friendly jumpstart. We’re also working on introducing fun accomplishment badges to celebrate new Bubblers’ early programming wins.
  • Improving the agency RFP system: The team is working on building out an AI-powered RFP spam detector to cut down on noise so that agencies and prospective clients can find one another more easily.
  • SSO and SOC 2: Stay tuned very soon!
  • Moving off CoffeeScript and onto Typescript: CoffeeScript is now at 1% of our codebase. Typescript is up to 23%. The remainder is Javascript.

A peek into the roadmap

It’s coming: We’re working on incorporating AI into the build process. The goal is for users to be able to use it to generate designs for any type of page and quickly connect to data and logic for a faster start. More to come!

Other updates

Platform stability and bug reports

This was not our best month from a platform and editor stability standpoint. If you missed our new Director of Platform Engineering Payam Azadi’s post-mortem on last week’s real-time notifications outage, you can read it here.

We’ve also heard your feedback on some recent bugginess, crashes, and overall slowness in the Bubble editor, both in forum posts like this one and on Twitter. We also heard you when you told us that it can be annoying to fill out bug reports, especially for hard-to-reproduce issues.

In response, we’ve already made a lot of changes, including fixes for many of those crashes and causes for slowness and many recently reported bugs. (Please keep submitting them when possible — it’s not a perfect process, but it really does help the team prioritize and investigate.)

In Q4, we plan to spend even more time on systematic improvements. We are planning to spend a substantial fraction of our Q4 roadmap on improving observability (which helps us catch performance regressions and new bugs), testing, and stability / robustness improvements, focusing both on the overall platform and on the Bubble editor.

Congratulations to Immerse Cohort 6!

This month, we introduced the sixth cohort of our Immerse Founders in Residence. Immerse is a fully funded, 6- to 8-week pre-accelerator program for underrepresented founders that gives participants skills, tools, and mentorship to build a fully functional app by the end of the program.

This was our first-ever cohort made entirely of women and femme-identified founders, which is significant because this group is severely underfunded in the tech world. The Immerse program is central to our mission of making it possible for anyone to bring their ideas to life. Congrats to these founders!

Be sure to join us at BubbleCon, as the agenda will include the first-ever live Demo Day, which is the Immerse program’s pitch competition and grand finale.

Team news

Over the course of August, we welcomed nine new team members.

  • As mentioned above, Payam joins us as our new director of platform engineering (we’re excited to see how he and his team uplevel our infrastructure and platform work going forward!)
  • Kabeer, Mitch, Peter, Ben, and Disha join us as software engineers
  • Sara joins the content team as associate content marketing manager
  • Elisabeth joins us as a technical product support specialist
  • Michael joins us as a senior product designer

Ways to get involved

​​

Thank you all for your support, and wishing you a great back to school season,

28 Likes
2

much love

even more love <3

3

:smiley:

:+1:

4

For me personally it’s the most important part. I don’t care about new features like prettier editor UI and other stuff if it leads to noticable downgrade in developing experience (editor freezing, data refreshing issues and so on). Stability of already existing features should be in priority.
Hope the focus will be concentrated on robust QA, especially smoke testing.

Bug reporting should be improved. Even Bubble power users (aka OGs) often just give up with bug reporting because:

  1. It’s too time consuming to fill bug reports with redundant data (that can be collected from the editor, just integrate bug reporting there)
  2. They are getting “expected behaviour” answers without any further clarification and explanation.
4 Likes
5

Awesome update. Thanks for hiring someone as @payam.azadi

1 Like
6

@josh thank you for this update!

There seems to be some descrepacny with your previously mentioned roadmap and the ‘what we are currently working on’ list here.

There’s no mention of the ‘loop’ feature that was revealed to be in the works a few months back at the Bubble Developer Summit ( https://www.youtube.com/live/EGHfoLZTJac?feature=shared at 35:55 )

Is this something we can still expect soon or has it been shelved for now?

Also, since the team is focusing on bulk data manipulation, I’m surprised an option to ‘create a list of things’ isn’t being worked on. I know it can be done via the Data API but would make life much easier if create a list of things was a thing!

5 Likes
7

Thanks for the update @josh. Really love the labels on the elements in the editor and ability to jump straight to workflows.

I also wanted to ask what’s happening with the loop function. I’ve been exploring Xano and I feel that this feature is one of the most basic and fundamental to any backend. Please don’t make me go to Xano. I’d rather give bubble my money.

8

I picture something like:
Pick Source data and datatype (e.g. Shopping Cart Item)
Pick Destination data and datatype (e.g. Order Item)
Map:
This Shopping Cart Item's Quantity to This Order Item's Quantity
This Shopping Cart Item's Product to This Order Item's Product

Then some static fields to set for each newly created Order Item like
Order = (some Create an Order step)

Then I can keep my emojis in my datatype names and fields since those break the Data API calls :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

1 Like
9

Best addition to the platform since the flexbox responsive system.

This will be great…what would be awesome as well is to make the ‘convert to reusable element’ feature available for an entire page rather than just container groups. The rationale is that a page with floating groups, popups and custom triggers take a very long time to convert manually into a reusable element…having the ability to just convert the entire page will save many hours of labor for developers in certain circumstances.

Any chance there will be a release of a feature to let us dictate which fields to return on a search? Or perhaps maybe add that into the API so we can just run API calls to search our database? Having this feature will remove the need to create a ‘search data type’ for those data types that are heavy and that are searched often. It will also help us reduce our WU costs.

10 Likes
11

Does “SOC 2” update still include a performance improvement as you indicated in previous monthly updates?
→
Bildschirmfoto 2023-09-04 um 09.48.07
←

1 Like
12

I think switching to a different bundler will do that. So not everything will be bundled on default for all pages.

13

Sure, that should improve frontend performance. I was more thinking about backend/request performance as currently every request goes to US servers which is super slow for every other continent.

1 Like
14

Aplicativos nativos estão nos planos de vocês?

15

nice to see you hire more software engineers and planning more time in Q4 for improving observability and editor robustness.

make changes to a list of things in my aps often changed 100-10k records so nice to see that speed doubling as that was often a bottleneck for busier apps.

1 Like
16

Bubblers have been asking for this for years. It would greatly reduce the complexity of so many workflows for us, but I’m not sure it will happen any time soon.

1 Like
17

You can currently get a “Create a list of things” already by using Data API to simplify your workflows you are talking about, but we are just requesting a native action for it because its so tedious setting up the JSON formatting and impossible to explain to other ppl how to set up.

1 Like
18

Yep, would make life a lot easier. Glad to see I’m not the only one waiting on this.

@nick.carroll @josh anything of note to share here?

19

Are you guys tracking how many bug reports are replied to with the issue reported being classed as intended or expected behavior? That would be a very interesting data point to see. Also, if Bubble is, is Bubble tabulating them according to the issue reported to get a better sense of the pain points users are reporting?

20

I’d pay a monthly fee just to see this metric.

1 Like