A Ground-Up Holiday Crunch Rebuild Adventure
After 4 years of development, Lumena was struggling to get their second MindGym to function as expected. Taylor came in to standardize, streamline, harden, and scale the MindGym. Then he worked with their executive team to rebuild the software from the ground up.
An Epic Tail of Blood, Sweat, and Tinsel.
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The original plan was to have Taylor come in and support scaling their V1 platform. Within 30 days, he was able to cut setup time for a new MindGym Platform deployment (not the physical cube) from several days to 1 hour. Better yet, each one came out functioning exactly like the first!
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The plan was never to rebuild the platform, only to stabilize it. As Lumena’s vision matured, they began to realize their existing software would not cut it. It was too prone to breaking, too difficult to add features, and not extensible. If fact, the more features that were added, the longer it took to build each new feature. Not scalable and becoming more and more expensive to maintain.
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As planning began around how to approach V2 of the Platform, Taylor gave a demo the Spruce Platform and its capabilities to Lumena’s leadership. It was a done deal! They knew, to hit their objectives on the timeline they needed, they had to lean fully into Spruce!
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Taylor was tasked with not only rebuilding the platform from the ground-up, but also building Lumena’s internal R&D team who could continue to maintain and enhance the platform on their own. This effort started in earnest in October of 2024. Lumena had their biggest demo ever scheduled with the Department of Defense in the 1st week of January. Game on.
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The team went to town, simultaneously learning a new way to write code, learning a new toolset, building on a new platform, while balancing the holiday, family time, while rebuilding a platform that took 4 years to build the first time. The team deployed the night before the demo. The on-site team did a trial run… SUCCESS!
After a grinding launch and a successful demo, the progress continues. Lumena is actively adding new features, writing missing tests, and plans on replacing every 3rd party dependency in favor of components written using the Spruce Tools.
The quality, reliability, and extensibility have become high benchmarks for what Lumena deploys and lets be real, very few software companies take it as seriously as we do.
In fact, Lumena brought in Eric to support the neuroscience that was happening on the MindGym. With his support, Lumena is on the path to replacing the de-facto data science platform on the market (which, unfortunately, has a very high per-MindGym licensing fee).
Eric, using the Spruce Tools and disciplines, has crafted a best-in-class suite of bio and neuroscience tools. Best part is? He opened sourced all of it!
Advanced Integrations
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EEG Headband
The Spruce Platform allowed Lumena to connect medical and consumer grade EEG Headbands and to utilize them to control different aspects of the MindGym Experience.
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Concert Grade Lighting & Sound
Connecting your brain wasn’t enough! Lumena needed to allow members to control lights and sound through thought alone! There are few experiences like controlling your environment with your mind!
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Cutting Edge Neuroscience
What you measure improves and connecting with industry standard cognitive tools enables Lumena to measure their members’ ability to focus, relax, and concentrate!
