Year 1 in Review

Wow our first year sure went fast. Technically speaking it was only 9 months as we got started in April. I was thinking it would be good to reflect on some of the important things that transpired here at 1904labs in Year 1:

1. With the sponsorship and support of Monsanto - and most specifically Mike Weaver Monsanto’s IT Director for Product Development - we hit the ground running building GIS-based software products for Monsanto.  This included hiring our first team of developers and developing a GIS BootCamp so everyone on the team understood how to develop the required software even if they had not done GIS development previously.
2. We worked with all of our team members to develop a set of Core Beliefs that we use to guide every decision we make here at 1904labs.  You can review our Core Beliefs here.
3. We developed an integrated software design and development approach grounded firmly in proven Human-Centered Software Design and Agile Development methods. We added some of our own insights as well including coining a term “Envisioneering” to refer to the upfront processes involved in envisioning a design with end users while in parallel engineering the technical specifications required to bring it to life.
4. A group of 1904labs folks formed a team to compete at Globalhack VI here in St. Louis in October. The hack was centered on creating software to help end homelessness.  Over 125 team and 1400 people competed in the event.  It was a lot of fun and a lot of work - it started at 6 pm on Friday night and ended around 4 PM on Sunday - and our team finished 2nd in the Pro division out of 87 teams. For that accomplishment, our team was awarded $100K and gained some cool press for 1904labs. Needless to say, we are pretty stoked about this outcome and really enjoyed helping to envisioneer and build software that can be used to end homelessness.

We had a lot of fun bringing 1904labs to life in 2016 and we see a bright future ahead as begin year 2.  I welcome you to check back to this blog often to see how things are going and what we are up to here at 1904labs.