Thank you for the hard work in this space! I think it is really important that there is a proper open source solution available.
I just found OptaPlanner and subsequently TimeFold few months ago, as I was searching for a solution for my wife's veterinary clinics employee scheduling problem. The problem is not big enough for anyone to pay for the solution, but big enough to cause stress for whom ever is dealing with manually doings the shifts.
It was interesting that there were a lot of online SaaS providers that claim to solve the problem but they just simply are not configurable for all kinds of constraints of a real workplace.
Unfortunately I also feel partially same with TimeFold, because designing those constraints really requires changing the way of thinking of many problems. While the engine is capable of doing what ever, there is a steep learning curve to do it.
So while the article mentions documentation, I would say that the documentation is far from sufficient for wide adaption.
Personally, I would have really needed documentation about a mental model of thinking about the problem, and then a ton of examples how to solve real employee scheduling problems. Problem written in a format which the business people use and then translated into an elegant constraint rule explained step by step.
I had to invest more than 40 hours to get a working MVP that solves real problems, not just those that are already coded in the example code. Most people are not willing to do that.
What I'm trying to say is that to making planner software popular, it should be also usable for trivial projects. I understand that it's hard to focus on everything, but just providing more information about real use cases and how they were solved and how to think about the design problems would make the market bigger, and bring you a lot more customers in the long run.
I just wonder how I might contribute to improve the documentation. I probably don't have deep enough understanding of the correct solution, but I will look into it.
Hi Tappio, read you loud and clear. We are actively looking into making it easier for all people to solve their planning problems. Our goal is to "free the world from wasteful scheduling" and we more than realize we can't do that alone. ;)
I scheduled large one-day events where attendees were recorded performing voiceover several times during the day. As many as 350 individual recordings throughout the day, each with an acting coach, studio engineer, studio room setup, custom sets of scripts, and a demographically optimized group of attendees that would go through the day together. Because each attendees journey through the day was (somewhat) customizable by them, each new attendee would change the schedule of some other attendees. So we would have to wait until ~80% of the tickets had been purchased to begin scheduling, each new attendee was progressively harder to schedule (making it hard to keep selling tickets), and we had to also be flexible with the support staff, engineers and coaches.
I've never heard that hearing. I've been living in multiple houses heated primarily with a heat pump in the winter during average temperature of minus 10 Celsius, ranging from 0 to -30.
My current garage has radiators installed but I've never used them as the heat pump is just fine.
I guess they must build the houses or heat pumps differently where you live!
We just launched a MVP for pdf data extraction https://excelifier.com/. The service is not open source and relies on open ai, which is probably a bit problematic in your case.
However, we understand that privacy concerns are really important for many organizations. Making it self-hostable and depend on a locally running LLM is something that we are looking into.
People just want to believe that humans are far more exceptional than we really are. These theories rest on the assumption that this 'elite' can predict the future. That there is no randomness in the world. That they are so smart and capable that they can just manipulate everyone. The truth is -- the individuals which make up the elite are just as clueless as everyone else. Furthermore, majority of them behave with good intentions. It is no surprise that no one really knows who represents the "elite". Once you dig deeper into the personality of each individual, you realise that they are just normal people. Often very selfish, but not much different from average Joe.
The problems that we see and blame the elite, god, what ever for, are due to systems we have created. Institutions, culture, feedback loops; everything that exists when large groups of individuals exist together.
We are privileged with my wife. Our combined workload is ~7 days per week, and our two kids are in the kindergarten 4 days per week. I work usually 3 days and my wife 4. This is not possible for most families, but I can highly recommend cutting the total hours if possible.
Learning takes a lot of effort. There are no shortcuts. To put effort into learning something, you need discipline and/or motivation. Biggest problem with learning for me has always been finding the motivation. When I'm motivated I'm switching between all the mentioned "learning methods". Also, the best suitable method depends on the topic too. And finally... I've always hated lectures, and have had a bad tendency to fall asleep... expect when I'm motivated and the topic is interesting!
I found out recently that I have a tendance to "want to multitask" even though I know I don't hear a single word spoken to me if I'm attentively reading something.
I'll see an interesting educational video on YouTube but i'll wait until I'm eating to play it or else I'll have a feeling of wasting my time.
Or in class if I have my computer in front on me i'll go check stuff on my server or do some web searches even if I really like the topic of the class.
I don't know if I'm missing motivation or discipline or both. I really enjoy talking and reading about the aformentioned topics, but I can't devote 100% of my attention to lectures/videos, or maybe only in 15-30 mins incréments.
Sounds very similar for me. It is pretty annoying sometimes, especially on remote meetings. I think it is some kind of ADHD tendency.
My comment came out quite black and white, the reality is of course very nuanced. I personally have hard time focusing. Even if I find the topic interesting I'm constantly switching attention, unless there is a strong immersion, like with development work.
My point was just that the "life hacks" of learning are quite useless if you are not interested or disciplined in the first place, and if you are... you unlikely need them. At least my personal experience is that when the topic is interesting and I have motivation, I usually "find a way" to learn more.
be careful that the habit to watch tv while eating doesn't turn into the habit of eating while watching tv.
i am running into these too. i think it is mainly discipline and difficulty to focus, wandering thoughts. i don't think it has anything to do with wanting to multitask. i don't want to multitask (except for the eat/tv thing) but i get distracted by thoughts and those are what make me do a web search or check something else.
The author is looking at the topic from a quite narrow perspective. The reasoning 'why' what he observed is happening could be due many other reasons. I think he also misunderstood some fundamental reasons why school exists in the first place, such as functioning as a "day care" for bigger kids allowing parents to work.
The article is based on an assumption of why something was done. It is positioned in a way that it immediately invokes a reaction "how can they be this stupid". But... What if that is not what those who made these decisions actually think? If he just assumes that is the case?
I'm no expert, but maybe it would help here to do a thought experiment of "what I might be missing from the puzzle?".
Lack of resources is one thing that was mentioned here. It is not that they drop the class and do nothing else. So what was the alternative? Where are the resources put now?
I'm quite sure there are other things we are missing too. I'd like to step into those people's shoes who are making the decisions to understand better why they chose what they chose, instead of assuming what they think.
Of course, if the goal is to actually improve equality, it is really stupid. Somehow I just doubt people are that dumb. There must be something more to it that I'm missing.
I just found OptaPlanner and subsequently TimeFold few months ago, as I was searching for a solution for my wife's veterinary clinics employee scheduling problem. The problem is not big enough for anyone to pay for the solution, but big enough to cause stress for whom ever is dealing with manually doings the shifts.
It was interesting that there were a lot of online SaaS providers that claim to solve the problem but they just simply are not configurable for all kinds of constraints of a real workplace.
Unfortunately I also feel partially same with TimeFold, because designing those constraints really requires changing the way of thinking of many problems. While the engine is capable of doing what ever, there is a steep learning curve to do it.
So while the article mentions documentation, I would say that the documentation is far from sufficient for wide adaption.
Personally, I would have really needed documentation about a mental model of thinking about the problem, and then a ton of examples how to solve real employee scheduling problems. Problem written in a format which the business people use and then translated into an elegant constraint rule explained step by step.
I had to invest more than 40 hours to get a working MVP that solves real problems, not just those that are already coded in the example code. Most people are not willing to do that.
What I'm trying to say is that to making planner software popular, it should be also usable for trivial projects. I understand that it's hard to focus on everything, but just providing more information about real use cases and how they were solved and how to think about the design problems would make the market bigger, and bring you a lot more customers in the long run.
I just wonder how I might contribute to improve the documentation. I probably don't have deep enough understanding of the correct solution, but I will look into it.