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.

Read more

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.

Read more

What is Parsing?

When you read an expression, like 1/2+3.4, you can immediately understand some of its meaning. You recognize that there are three numbers, and that the numbers are combined with operators. You may also recall that division has higher precedence than addition, so you would divide 1/2 before adding +3.4 when evaluating the expression.

Read more