Hey everyone, Ryan here. At Keen IO, we’ve recently released something we are very proud and excited about — Data Visualizations! We’ve known we were going to build visualizations for a very long time, and the story of why we haven’t built it until now is almost more interesting than the story of actually building it.
For the last six months, our whole team has had grand visions of what our visualization capabilities would look like. We spent lots of time drooling over our favorite pet features — APIs to retrieve .pngs or SVGs, using a library like D3 to make awesome looking visualizations full of customizations, and out of the box dashboard templates just to name a few.
All of that brainstorming and obsessing made us feel like building visualizations would take weeks, if not months. So we put it off, opting for quicker wins and things we felt we could make iterative progress on. For some reason, when it came to visualizations, we were too scared and didn’t know where to start.
Finally, a few Friday nights ago, the right amount of ambition, alcohol and lack of plans on a Saturday led to a breakthrough. Kyle and I decided to spend our Saturday taking a crack at it. By 6 o’clock that night, we had not only built a prototype for something that worked, we built something that was amazingly useful. All we had were some rudimentary line charts, but we had tons of fun visualizing the data we’ve been collecting about you guys.
That day of hacking gave us the energy and motivation required to crank out the rest of the first version of our JavaScript library over the next week. It was nowhere near our ideal solution. It only had a fraction of the customizations we dreamed up. But, it turns out that it already solves a ton of problems for us and, more importantly, for our customers.
In the end, our ability to dream big actually inhibited us from building. Perhaps because we were afraid of not meeting our own expectations or even letting ourselves down. But now, having gone through that experience, it has given our team a new life and a new motto: Just Fucking Build It.
