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Busy quarter! In Q1, we set out to:

• Make it easier and faster to build advanced, secure forms.
• Spark more joy in the developer experience.

Making it easier and faster to build secure forms

Building forms is a critical and necessary flow within ����������. Whether you’re building a simple app to collect data or a complex approval flow to manage overtime requests, there’s a critical form at the heart of the workflow. By improving the form-building experience, we are improving every ���������� experience. From chatting with customers, we quickly understood why ���������� was unique - it offered a “secure and flexible” experience for building forms. There are three main reasons for this:

• Data control: Connect and store data within your database
• Self-host: Deploy ���������� on your infrastructure
• Flexible: Build any form from multi-step to dynamic

The effort to improve form-building involved multiple teams pulling together.

New form features

From a product perspective, worked with the product and engineering team to release several features:

We will also launch a new signature component next week 🖋 .

New form tutorials

released ten new guides to help you successfully build forms with ����������:

1. How to build a data collection form
2. Embedding a ���������� form
3. How to build an availability form
4. How to build an employee complaint form
5. How to build an expense reimbursement form
6. How to build a client intake form
7. How to build an IT request form
8. How to build an audit form
9. How to build a timesheet
10. How to build a change request form

New form templates

To top the quarter off and help new users streamline the onboarding process, we created three new templates:

1. Change request form
2. Information request form
3. Visitor check-in form (demo below)

These templates offer a great starting point when building forms with ����������. You can find out more about the templates on the ���������� Forms landing page .

A different type of form builder

We believe ���������� offers a unique perspective and improved experience regarding form building. We’ve detailed its strengths on the ���������� Forms landing page - security is the primary driver. We’ve also outlined why ���������� is a better fit for specific use cases versus other form builders .

Since focusing on Forms in January, we’ve seen a steady uplift in the number of new users building forms, which is encouraging. This chart does not take into account self-hosters or existing users.

We’re very proud of what we’ve achieved in such a short amount of time. We will continue to improve the form-building experience over the upcoming months, but it won’t be our primary focus.

Sparking joy in the developer experience

On average, ���������� users spend more time in the design section than in the data and automation sections combined. So, it made sense to start here.

Coding in ����������

When it comes to user research, being Open Source is a huge advantage. It makes it easy to learn what users feel strongly about. And, by a long margin, users wanted a better coding experience within ����������. Everyone within the ���������� team knew this was an area of limitation, and we were delighted to tackle the problem 👊 with 2 amazing features.

Live evaluation - ���������� will evaluate your code and preview the output when writing code within the design section. Credit to for delivering a much-needed feature. It has made the binding experience exponentially better.

Reusable snippets - Reuse snippets of code when building apps with ����������. This is a major productivity gain and another nod to who recently implemented this. Reuasable snippets is a Premium Feature .

Faster Cloud, faster development, faster apps.

, , , and spent several weeks improving the performance of ���������� Cloud. It’s now a lean, mean, app development machine (I’m allowed one terrible joke). I’ve included some of the results of our efforts below (they’re a little technical).

• Median latency retrieving documents from CouchDB has been reduced from ~30ms to 7ms. 90th percentile is down from ~500ms to 18ms.
• Container restarts are down from ~30/hour to ~1-2/hour.
• The median latency for our most hit endpoint, /api/:sourceId/search is down from ~500ms to ~200ms.

We plan to write a detailed post about our Cloud performance efforts in the upcoming weeks.

And then some…

• Native n8n integration - A few weeks back, we launched our native n8n integration. .
• Automation Scripting Action UX improvements - We made a small yet impactful improvement to the user experience within the automation scripting action.
• over 200,000 teams have used ���������� to build apps.
• We reached .
• Thank you to Sourcee, mheim_sx, and Poirasiz for all their community contributions.
• Check out the following ChatGPT clone created by a community member:

Up next in Q2

Delivering a best-in-class experience for building Portals

In Q2, we will focus on another popular use case: Portals. For those of you building a portal with ����������, we’d love your feedback on the current experience - .

���������� DB improvements (and more 👁️ )

We’re also planning a major update to ���������� DB - filtering by relationship.

GovTech event

We’re exhibiting at our first event - - in London on the 8 May. If you’re attending, please let me know - joe at budibase dot com - and we’ll grab some coffee.

Partnerships research

We’re currently exploring the possibility of building an ecosystem of partners. If you want to learn more and help inform my research, .