This year, our team thought we’d start a tradition called the “State of Roompact Address.” As President of Roompact, it’s my privilege to guide you through a look back on 2016 and a look forward to 2017.
Looking Back
At the beginning of the year, Christian Charukiewicz stepped into the role of Chief Technology Officer at Roompact. In addition to writing great code, Christian has been doing excellent work in developing the processes behind our software development, which allows our engineers to work more effectively while driving innovation. You can read more about it in Christian’s blog post on the 3 elements of an effective software development team.
We also had two new full time staff members join our team this year. In March, we were excited to bring on Dr. Paul Gordon Brown as our Director of Curriculum, Training, and Research. Paul relocated to Chicago after finishing his PhD at Boston College. Shortly after Paul joined our team, we welcomed recent University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate, Shubham Agarwal, as our newest Software Engineer. Shubham has been a wonderful addition to our team and has been blazing a trail of top-notch code. Also adding to our development team during the summer were two interns, Joey and Artur, who both learned a lot and contributed important new features to the Roompact software.
Turning attention to our software, in 2016 we had a net gain of 455,450 lines of code to our code base, which included several new and improved features. Early in the year, we launched our Schedule tool, which helps our partners schedule and track duty and work shifts. Over the summer, we launched a self-service Microsurvey tool and an Events module. We also had a quite a few technology improvements, including an upgraded API (which allows for more integrations with other campus software solutions), the addition of caching (which drastically sped up page load times), and an upgrade of our base programming language, PHP. If you have a Roompact account, you can read more about our upgrades from the past year in our Announcements.
This year we also greatly enhanced our training and professional development offerings. We launched a new customizable training framework, which gives our partners access to exceptional training documentation and allows partner schools to custom-tailor training programs to meet their needs. In August we launched our new blog (which you’re currently reading) to provide additional resources to our clients and give back to the profession as a whole. We also shared our knowledge through presentations at professional conferences and were proud to sponsor this year’s Residential Curriculum Institute.
One final update: Our team relocated to a new office in downtown Chicago. If you’re in the area, shoot us a message and stop by!
Looking Forward
2017 is shaping up to be another exciting year of tremendous growth. We’re very close to announcing a new position opening on the Roompact team. As we grow, we want to make sure we continue to focus on providing each one of our clients with top-notch support — so we’re going to bring someone on board to focus on client success on a full-time basis. We’ll be looking for someone with student affairs experience who can help us manage customer support and onboard new schools. Stay tuned to our blog and social media accounts for more information over the next month.
We’re just days away from releasing an update to our Schedule tool, which will add functionality for shift trading and will substantially improve speed and the overall user experience. Beyond this immediate upgrade, we plan on releasing several major upgrades and exciting new features over the next year, including enhancements that will aid schools that utilize a curricular approach in their work.
Look for a Roompact team member at just about any conference you plan on attending in 2017 — we plan on racking up plenty of miles as we travel the world to connect with current and future partners!
Phew! It’s not so easy to sum up a year’s worth of amazing growth and work in a few paragraphs. These were the highlights, but there were many other accomplishments and wins that were just too numerous to list. The trust and support of every one of our partner institutions means the world to our team, and we promise to continue to work tirelessly to improve Roompact and contribute to our industry as a whole. We’re extremely grateful to be able to work with each and every one of you so closely.
In closing, thank you!
