Building software products and bringing them to the world is a rollercoaster. Boy do we know it.
When telling the Lenses story, we could write about the collective exhale after fixing a tricky development issue. We could reflect on the sprint that turned into marathons. We could look back on our early open-source contributions to the Kafka community, in 2016 when the technology’s success was still a glimmer on the horizon.
We could list the highs, the lows, the stops, starts; the features shipped. The rush of hitting revenue milestones. The long days leading up to a release. But for us, the people part of developing software has always been what it’s really about.
It is helping our customers to find data they need; helping them to make the most of this new world of streaming. It is the moment when people can freely and independently do their work, without an endless dependence on a central team. It is making sure a complex technology can help people to fulfill their potential, to build the real-time services we all rely on.
Most people see a company as something you build and then invite a team to move into. At Lenses, we've grown differently. We explore and learn alongside our customers and partners every day. We continue to listen, and contribute projects to the community. We try new things, see what works, and change direction when needed.
This approach isn't just because we're doing something new - it's at the heart of who we are. Sure, it feels safe to do what we know will work. But testing new ideas? That's scary. And that's exactly what we love - solving tough problems no one has cracked before and turning bold ideas into reality. It’s what gets us excited.
So when the team brought a big challenge to the table at an offsite – unifying the developer experience across different streaming technologies – we couldn’t pass it up. We came up with a big idea to re-architect our product.
It’s called Lenses 6 Panoptes. It keeps all the things users love about Lenses, but does them bigger, better, and more beautifully.
Today, we love watching the ripple of excitement when we explain to customers that a hybrid data infrastructure doesn't have to mean data silos. When we show people that they can tap into every single team’s streams, to build something new that responds to the world as it happens, and is greater than the sum of its parts.
Our product has evolved, and so have we as a company. We’ve kept what makes us “us”, but our potential has grown. We hope that Lenses helps you realize your full potential too.