Desmos Engineering

Take a peek at what some of our Shape Up teams have recently released!

Update: April 29, 2021

When the Desmos product team adopted Basecamp’s Shape Up process, we adapted it to be our own — you can read more about that below. Given the problematic power structures at Basecamp that have recently come to light, we’re taking time to introspect on how to make our product-building process more democratic, preserving what serves us while modifying it to ensure that the way we work is consistent with our values.

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2020 was a long, awful year that brought about many changes to our daily lives and the way we work. Some of these changes we cannot wait to reverse - travelling, meeting up at coffee shops, gathering around a whiteboard to brainstorm, safely seeing co-workers in person - but some changes are likely here to stay.

This year at Desmos we made many big changes, from building out a brand new team to support our curriculum program to shutting down our office permanently and becoming a fully remote company. In the midst of a truly crazy year, with many external and internal distractions, our product development team managed to keep humming along and building great things for our users - from releasing a new activity editing experience to completely revamping our homepage to releasing classes to upgrading our styling options in the calculator, and many many more. Our success with shipping new things this year is due in no small part to our implementation of a new framework for planning and organizing projects: Shape Up.

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Over the past year, Desmos has made major improvements to the robustness of regressions (i.e., fitting models to data) in the graphing calculator, particularly for trigonometric, exponential, and logistic models. This post will outline some of the challenges of solving regression problems and some strategies we have used to overcome those challenges.

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