Lev Lazinskiy

R1D18 Moonshots Day 1

LaunchDarkly has an internal hackathon that they call Moonshots. I was excited to participate in my first one.

My project was to try to integrated a pardot form with inka.io in order to prevent a human being from having to manually transfer data from one place to another when a LaunchDarkly fan requests a T-Shirt.

This turned out to be a lot more challenging than I initially thought. Pardot makes it very easy for marking teams to create various forms and automate the results of those forms to other systems like SalesForce. They also make it fairly easy to perform custom actions by way of form handlers. The problem is that they don’t allow you to do both. You either need to re-invent the wheel and do all of the email automation and Salesforce integration stuff yourself, or try to come up with a different solution.

On the other side of the equation, inka.io has a decently documented API. Unfortunately it does not quite work a documented and I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to get it to work with a guess and check model.

I made a small python service that receives information from pardot and sends it over to inka. This involved writing a light weight wrapper around the inka API and making a handful of objects to perform data validation outside of the form (since inka is very particular about the data that it gets).

I was able to send data to inka without any issues, but getting data from pardot into the service was a whole other issue which I hacked around on the next day.