The Pendo Developers site has a new look and lots more content! Of course, this is still the place to get updates on Pendo’s customer-facing mobile SDKs and browser agent updates, but stick around and check out some of our new posts from Engineering on how and why Pendo works the way it does. We’ve also added API documentation on integrating Pendo with your application and how Pendo interacts with applications out of the box.
Archives: Engineering Blog Posts
Engineering Blog Post
Why We Built Pendo Reports for Confluence
At Pendo, the product and engineering teams use Confluence for almost all knowledge sharing.
An idea might start in a meeting or Slack thread but it’s not canon until we’ve captured and shared it in a Confluence doc. It’s the cauldron where data from a variety of sources get mixed into the message—the purpose—of what we’re doing next. One of the most-shared data sources in Confluence is Pendo itself (as you might expect from a tool that provides product insights). Almost hourly, our product managers copied and pasted rows from reports or charts from our web app’s UI to help describe the point of a doc. When we approached the team about an Atlassian product integration, the choice was obvious; it should be Confluence.
Once we decided to build the integration, many questions remained. What should we build? Where should we begin? What is the steel thread to build first to get this party started? The integration build took a few unexpected turns. Here’s a bit of that journey.
How We Built Pankbot
Last week, Pendo hosted our second, semi-annual hackathon, or, as we like to call it, Bias to Hack. During this round of Bias to Hack, I sat back and joined another team; six months ago, however, I was pitching my own idea. It was an idea that would make the lives of Pendozers much easier but one that requires a bit of explanation.
Get Going at GopherCon
The Go community is growing by leaps and bounds: a fact borne out by the 2017 TIOBE programming language popularity index, which shows Go moving up to tenth place from last year’s 55th place.
Further proof of Go’s rapid ascent was evident to those who attended the recent GopherCon in Denver, CO. Imagine hanging out with 1,500 of your fellow Gophers, many of whom traveled great distances to learn from the Go experts and each other.
The Pendo backend engineering team attended this year’s event in force. We love Go and use it to process hundreds of millions of data points a day, along with querying and summarizing that data in innumerable ways. Pendo is a 100% Go shop on the backend, no legacy code (we’ve been using Go since version 1.2). In addition to learning the latest Go tips and tricks, the team pitched in to help our recruiting manager answer questions about Pendo and our backend development opportunities.
The Agent
Since I started working at Pendo, people often ask, “What is Pendo?” From an engineering perspective, if Pendo is one thing it would be what we call “The Agent.” The agent is a bundled set of JavaScript code that makes use of almost every capability inside of a web browser. When our customers want to take advantage of everything Pendo does (web analytics, page interaction recordings, guide delivery, and so much more), all they need to do to get started is add a script tag that downloads the agent on their page, and the agent takes it from there. It’s a simple process for our customers, but there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes.