Small details matter

When you build an app, the small details matter! It can be tempting to rush to the “outcome” and cut corners. But the things that can’t be seen, are as important as what is visible.

One small mistake in organising your app can create hours or days of work later. Or worse, may compromise the security of your app’s data, make your app unscalable, or make it almost impossible to test and eliminate bugs.

Without understanding these details, it is impossible to be an effective Bubble developer (or manage a developer or dev team to be truly effective). Here are five concepts you must consider and understand to have a best practice Bubble app.

Scalability

Apps can be built in a scalable way or a non-scalable way. Reducing the number of page elements and correctly structuring your database can be the difference between a scalable and non-scalable app. 

Security

Correctly planning and documenting privacy rules, user interface conditionals and frontend database constraints are critical to organise and implement. Correctly configuring APIs is essential to ensure security of data. 

Reliability

Does your app act unpredictably in the real world? Is it difficult to identify the cause of bugs and eliminate them? Understanding race conditions and how multiple users access and writing to the same data can cause unpredictable results. You must consider all possible interactions to achieve reliability.

Maintainability

Have you had to make a change in 5, 10 or 100 places in your user interface elements or workflows? Have you created such a complex nested “If, then” >“If, then” >“If, then” >“If, then” logic that you can’t make sense of the potential outcomes, and fix issues when they arise in a timely way? Would another developer or agency pick up your work and tear out their hair - proposing a rebuild vs continuing with the work done? If so, you need to improve the maintainability of your work. 

Testability

Does it take an impossibly long time to test your work? Do you experience multiple, serious bugs (“regressions”) i unexpected places whenever you change something else about your app? Do you know how to organise business logic in a way that we can say unequivocally that “it works”, rather than applying fixes upon fixes upon fixes, but never reaching something that is truly functional? If not you must better consider testability.

Production Rules

One way to accomplish these principles is to follow production rules. These are rules about app organisation, naming conventions, and logic that help you to achieve these principles. Momentum Group and Momentum Academy have a documented set of production rules that are the basis of our teaching.

Documentation

Without adequate documentation of data structures, workflows, and page structures, it is almost impossible to achieve these concepts. We have a documentation template that we will teach and enable you to communicate these principles. 

Momentum Academy Bootcamp

Many experienced, self-taught Bubble developers join our Bubble Bootcamp program because they want to make sure they are following best practices. 

Also, founders and business owners have taken our course so they can understand the apps their companies are building and ensure quality and best practices are achieved.  

Joining our Bootcamp is like being mentored and working under a senior developer for 12 months, so you can learn best practices and implement them in your work. We hope to meet you there!