Internal Documentation

2024 Highlights

December 20, 2024 (Review of Week EOY-2)

Hi, everyone! Welcome to the last official day of work for 2024! Erika and I thought it would be a good moment to celebrate our wins for the year as everyone takes minute to take a deep breath next week before diving into 2025!

Highlights from all of us

Bomee

  • Made a lot of steady progress on horizontal management. There are a lot of processes that we needed to flesh out, and we got going on many of them, laying a foundation for figuring out how to keep our horizontal special sauce as we grow in the years to come.
  • We got to know a lot of the investors we’ll need in a year or two. There are a lot of investors out there, but not we want to be picky about how we let on boat!
  • Created a lot of buzz and good will in NY, and started to forge relationships beyond!

Marc

  • National product expansion
  • Learnings from NYC pilot scale testing of elements of our full product vision from the 321Go! program to the contractor bidding
  • Generally building out the capabilties of a team that integrates TechE’s and MechE’s in a way that no one else is doing

And capturing the posts from our Slack thread:

Erika (Growth Lead) Dec 9th at 10:58 AM

I’ll start and add as I also think about it!

  • We became a Certified B Corp!
  • We are set up to hire folks remotely, anywhere, and can build on this in 2025
  • We shored up our financial operations and have reliable financial data we can dig into.

Jeremy (Coder) Dec 9th at 10:58 AM

Lots of building science logic was moved out of the momentum app into a much cleaner micro-service, and can now move much faster.

Jeff (QA) Dec 9th at 11:49 AM

IDK if this counts, but just can talk on what I help contribute on the daily since joining. Integration of a QA process into our SDLC, enhancing workflow visibility, ownership, and product quality through ticket-driven development, risk-focused targeted regression testing, and a reusable test case repository that ensures stability and this help in delivering features into production that actually works.

François (HOE) Dec 9th at 2:45 PM

We’re on track to get SOC-2 type 2 audit completed by end of January, providing industry standard credibility for security best practices.

Robin Dec 11th at 11:30 AM

We added:

  • 17 new measures (types of building retrofits)
  • 6 new auto-generated suggested scopes
  • 300,000 new buildings in the BKB across three states
  • climate data, energy costs, and greenhouse gas coefficients for the entire USA
  • By end of December we will also have ~170,000 public housing buildings in the database, covering all 50 states and US territories.

Jason (Product) Dec 19 at 6:30 AM

  • The calc service change, which has enabled much faster addition of new measures and rebate programs, and moving out of NYC only
  • Transactions, for two reasons:
  • Financially–revenue coming in that way as another avenue to subscriptions
  • Getting contractors to bid based on spec and without all of them having to visit the building–which is a great proof point. And the bid ranges were pretty tight too!

Chuck (Coder) Dec 19 at 11:26 AM

I think the biggest win is the staff. We have assembled a team of dedicated and all-around amazing people.

Product Improvements

I wanted to get a snapshot of how Momentum has changed this year, so let Claude summarize our release and PR notes:

2024 was also a year of significant architectural improvements and modernization of the codebase, alongside the user-facing features. The platform appears to be moving toward a more modular, maintainable architecture with better development tooling and quality controls. The releases show the team methodically removing old calculations, adding debugging tools, implementing new validation approaches, and carefully managing the transition. Commits like “surface up the errors” and “stop relying on allMeasures in calcs payload” suggest they’re also taking the opportunity to improve error handling and optimize the data being passed between systems. The regular pacing of releases and mix of both major features and small fixes indicates a sustainable development rhythm rather than a frenzied push environment.

Highlights:

  • Geographic Expansion and Feature Maturity The expansion beyond NYC showed the platform was ready to scale, with robust enough calculations and data structures to handle different jurisdictions and utility programs. This both validates the platform’s maturity and opens new growth opportunities.
  • Technical Architecture Evolution The calculation service migration stands out as a major win - it’s the kind of foundational improvement that’s hard to get approval for but critical for long-term success. The methodical execution suggests strong engineering leadership.
  • Feature Depth The sophistication of new features like partial electrification and measure interactions shows deep domain knowledge informing product development. They’re solving real user problems in nuanced ways.

Technical Infrastructure Changes

  • Migration to Livewire 3
  • Shift from Laravel-Mix to Vite for build tooling
  • Implementation of code formatting standards (Prettier for blade files)
  • Addition of PHP static analysis tools (PHPStan with Larastan)
  • Security improvements (secure session cookies, SSH key management)

Project Management Features

  • Development of a new Generic Projects (GP) component
  • Enhanced contractor bid management system
  • New dashboard UI with separate tabs for Buildings, Collections, and Projects
  • Improved RFP (Request for Proposals) functionality
  • File upload improvements for project documents

Team Structure & Development Process

  • Multiple developers contributing (including bionboy, mkhrystunov, JeremyParker, FrancoisHuet)
  • Regular feature flagging for controlled rollouts
  • Structured code review process
  • Usage of Sentry for error tracking and replays

Database & Architecture Changes

  • Clean-up of legacy calculations as they moved to a calculation service
  • Table renaming and restructuring for CPC (Community Preservation Corporation) projects
  • Implementation of soft deletes for certain tables
  • Improved handling of building metadata

Testing & Quality

  • Implementation of deterministic testing with seeded faker data
  • Enhanced validation rules
  • Addition of flaky test templates
  • Improved error handling

Scoping & Measure Improvements

Major System Improvements

  • Enhanced energy data updates to include 2023 calendar year data for NYC buildings
  • Better envelope measures modeling and calculations
  • Improved measure interactivity for evaluating electrification and envelope scopes
  • Updated utility rates with projected values for late 2024/2025

New Measures Added

  • Crawlspace/Basement Insulation
  • Storm Windows Installation
  • Wall Insulation with Blown-in Cellulose
  • Elevator Modernization with VVVF drives and regenerative braking
  • Steam Heating Optimization combinations
  • Expanded heat pump options

Program & Rebate Updates

  • Updated MFEEP and AMEEP program rates
  • Clean Heat rebate updates
  • Beneficial Electrification Credit automation for NYC LL97

Cost & Calculation Improvements

  • Updated costs for heat pump water heaters ($4,500 per unit)
  • Refined cost calculations for induction stoves
  • Enhanced building envelope modeling for more accurate savings estimates
  • Updated energy rates projections for late 2024/2025

Please Leave Feedback

Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps us to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!

  • What are your highlights / lowlights?
  • Did we miss a highlight? Something else you want to react to?

Erika (Growth Lead) Dec 20th, 2024 at 11:01 AM

I’m really proud of this team and glad we’re working on this vision together. Haha, I didn’t read that fast, I just read the memo early :slightly_smiling_face: great job all! :plus1: 1