The latest from the PostHog community

Array 1.19.0

Dec 15, 2020

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This new release is a great mix between old and new, with significant improvements to both our newer features, as well as our core analytics stack.

Once again, we were heavily driven by feedback, having done a bunch of calls with our users and actively engaging with the PostHog community on Slack and GitHub. Keep the feedback coming!

Release Notes

If you're self-hosting and want to upgrade for a better experience with nicer features, remember to update your PostHog instance.

Scheduled Apps and Editor

App Editor Screenshot

We now support scheduled apps that run periodically on a specified time cycle (e.g. minute, hour, day), as well as have a built-in code editor for apps right into the PostHog UI.

With the ability to run tasks in specified time intervals, you can now setup apps that, for example, keep track of external metrics and add this data to PostHog via new events. This is possible because we now support posthog.capture calls inside apps as well.

Some metrics you might want to keep track of are, for example, server performance, GitHub activities (e.g. stars ⭐ ), engagement with your project's social media profiles, and anything else you can think of!

Here's an example to give you an idea:

JavaScript
async function runEveryMinute({ config }) {
    const url = `https://api.github.com/repos/PostHog/posthog`
    const response = await fetch(url)
    const metrics = await response.json()


    posthog.capture('github metrics', {
        stars: metrics.stargazers_count,
        open_issues: metrics.open_issues_count,
        forks: metrics.forks_count,
        subscribers: metrics.subscribers_count
    })
}

You can learn more about scheduled apps on the PR that created them, as well as our docs for building your own app.

Note: Apps are a Beta feature currently and only available on self-hosted instances. We are working to make it available on PostHog Cloud soon.

Lifecycle Analysis

Lifecycle Screenshot

Our 'Trends' tab just got an awesome new feature: lifecycle graphs!

Lifecycle analysis digs deeper into your events and shows you a breakdown of the users who performed the event into new, returning, and resurrecting users. In addition, it also shows you the churn on for the specified time period.

To use it, select 'Shown As' -> 'Lifecycle' when in the 'Trends' tab.

New Session Recording Compression Scheme

Gzip Session Recording Screenshot

See the image above? That's our event processing time before and after the new compression scheme!

By using gzip-based compression, we have now significantly improved performance both on the client and server, making event processing faster, as well as decreasing the number of session recordings that are lost. Be on the lookout for more green play buttons on your 'Sessions' page now.

Also, while on the topic of session recording, have you been keeping up with the updates to our player?

If you installed posthog-js via npm, you should update to version 1.8.0 to get access to this update. Snippet users have access to the latest version by default.

New Actions UX

New Actions UX Screenshot

This might not be news to all of you, since we have been experimenting with our actions UX using feature flags. However, we're now rolling out a new UX for creating actions to all PostHog users, so try it out let us know what you think!

New operations for numerical properties

In addition to the average, sum, maximum, and minimum operations available to numerical properties in trends, we now also support median, and 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles.

Share your feedback

We'd love to hear anything you have to say about PostHog, good or bad. As a thank you, we'll share some awesome PostHog merch.

Want to get involved? Email us to schedule a 30 minute call with one of our teams to help us make PostHog even better!

Favorite Issue

Session recording player ux improvements

Our session recording feature is getting better by the day! The latest improvements to our player have made the UX much smoother, and you can keep up-to-date and supply feedback about the player on the issue above.

PostHog News

Eltje has joined us to lead our efforts on the People & Talent front, bringing some much-needed experience as we grow our team. Like James, she was a professional cyclist before venturing into talent, and she is (unfortunately) a lover of pineapple on pizza.

Share your feedback

We'd love to hear anything you have to say about PostHog, good or bad. As a thank you, we'll share some awesome PostHog merch.

Want to get involved? Email us to schedule a 30 minute call with one of our teams to help us make PostHog even better!

Community Shoutouts

Big thanks to the following members of our community who have contributed to PostHog over this release cycle:

Open Roles

Are you a Fullstack Engineer, Marketing Lead, or Growth Engineer?

Or perhaps you're not either but think you'd still be a good fit for PostHog?

We want you!

Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

In addition to the highlights listed above, we also merged a bunch of PRs improving PostHog's performance and fixing bugs:


Ready to find out more?

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