Questions to ask a Bubble freelancer (interview)

Jobs / Freelance
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I have had some good luck and bad luck with bubble freelancers and agencies. I want to do a technical screening of bubble freelancers. Thinking of building a database of questions to ask. What would you ask bubble freelancers?

I was thinking questions like:

How would you secure that only users that created something can access the notes object?
(setup privacy rules: This notes creator is current user)

How do you get the date of the beginning of the week (get current date and round to week and set hours/minutes/seconds to 0).

Simple questions like that to filter out freelancers who say they know bubble but lack knowledge and experiences.

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Hey!
Yup, it is hard to find qualified assistance.

- Are you able to create a scalable database structure and optimized one?

This is one of the essential things. If you have a terrible scalable and non-optimized database, that will force you to spend much more resources (time and money) to fix that in the future. You’ll need to update all workflows, elements. If your app is in production mode - that’s a headache since you need to bulk update the existing records as well.

- How do you keep a Bubble app clean? How you avoid duplicate elements, workflows? Do you create styles for elements?

If you have duplicate things in your app, that also forces you to spend more resources for debugging, fixing, and adding new features.
For instance, if your app has the follower feature (add/remove), it can be implemented in one place - and then triggered whenever you need from an app’s places—the same story with displaying elements that have workflows. If you have a share feature kind of a group with share icons - it also can be implemented in one place and be reused multiple times.
Also, styles should be attached mostly for each element.

- How do you keep a Bubble app friendly to read (DB, workflows, elements, styles)?

That’s another one of the crucial things.
When new developers are working on the app, it’s essential to have a clean and readable app. Otherwise, it takes much more time then it should.
For instance, how the fields of a table are named?
That’s crazy when we see a field called kind of “What is this regarding?”. Omg. Just name it “description”.
Or “How much?” number type. Call it “price”.
“How can they contact?” list of things. Lol.

When you have correctly defined (named) things, it is much easier to get a sense of the big picture and be able to navigate faster.

Another crazy thing to see an app where names removed of such elements as Group, Repeating Group, Focus Group, etc.
For instance, there should be a “Repeating Group Property,” but you have just “Properties.” So, you cannot easily find the specific element via the search bar, but you need to you the search tool instead that takes more time.

- What is for the Backend Workflows sections? How do you use it, and in which cases?

There is an extended list of cases for that section. So, there is no right answer. But, asking that question, you can analyze the experience of the person/team.

I might miss something. I hope that helps.
Let me know if you have any questions, please.

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Also, when you hired someone, this person/team should argue things correctly.
I mean, if you see something weird or odd in the app, you should ask a question: “May I know why you did it in that way?”. If the answer won’t convince you, that’s a bad thing. You’ll need to rethink the current collaboration.
Another good suggestion is to validate each phase (milestone) of development. That will be a huge waste if you see that the app went the wrong way long ago, and the budget exceeds soon.

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Check the dev’s knowledge of DB fundamentals. Foreign keys vs lists of things: when and where. Why would you want to ever normalize a table and where is a good example where you would want to denormalize. What’s a metadata table and why is it important for app control. How would you construct a crossref table in Bubble for complex associations.

To me, any app that will grow to an enterprise-level app, backend workflows are critical. The dev needs to know how to call recursive workflows and how to control their behavior. How do they prevent Bubble’s timeout should the table they’re calculating off of scale 10x?

The soft spot of every dev is of course documentation. Ask the dev how they comment workflows, an example of how they’ve constructed and called log tables, etc.

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Good idea. Altho best database practice is a bit different in bubble due to some privacy rules restrictions