Dan here. This has been one of the most productive months I've ever seen from our team, with sweeping performance improvements that make workflows dramatically faster and more efficient, significant enhancements to our editor, and a growing team bringing new expertise and energy to the project. From a 5x speedup in workflow parsing to new recording and testing capabilities in the editor, we are delivering real operational gains while continuing to invest in the reliability, security, and ease of use that your teams depend on.

Performance

To put it simply, things just got a lot faster.

We have made a multitude of major performance improvements across our full application stack. While we are certainly getting some help from LLMs to identify areas for improvement, we are working carefully, critically, and surgically. We have reduced workflow parsing time to 1/5th of what it was. Compression now delivers an 88% reduction in serialized workflow size, with a new serialization method adding a further 43% on top of that. Running workflows are now serialized 4x faster, with a 10x improvement in the memory footprint for workflow state and history — meaning your workflows run faster, cost less to operate, and scale further. We work as a team, but want to call out Jon Herron for one of the most prolific periods of performance and feature additions we've seen in a while.

The Team Is Growing

Tim Stevens is joining us in a fractional advisory role as we look for new ways to build a sustainable open source project and mature our commercial offerings to more directly address the needs of organizations like yours.

Jacob Armstrong also joins the team this month as a new software engineer. He fixed several issues in our editor and will be introducing some optional AI enhancements to help make building workflows faster and more intuitive. We are eager to make our editor easier to use, while allowing you to remain fully in control of your business workflows. Looking forward to seeing what you develop, Jacob!

Editor Enhancements

We added support for recording the execution of a process in our editor. Use the new record button to capture form responses and API calls as your workflow runs. These recordings let you jump directly to any point in a workflow for faster iteration, or serve as automated tests that verify your workflows complete as expected. This started as a small addition, but a valuable one, and we've put substantial effort into making it feel intuitive, fast, and dependable.

Connector Improvements

We are continuing to refine our long-running service tasks and callbacks, improving reliability when integrating SpiffWorkflow with external systems and services.

Spiff-Arena Updates

We updated the code editor in Arena, moving from Monaco to CodeMirror, for a better overall scripting experience. We've also improved the display of error messages in the Arena editor, making it easier to identify and resolve issues quickly.

Community Contributions