Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
A hotel front desk never closes, which means someone senior has to be reachable at 3am just as much as at 3pm — even though the person who can actually approve a comp or handle an angry guest at 3am is a different kind of role than the night auditor working the desk. Housekeeping runs on its own tight window, and maintenance mostly doesn’t need covering overnight at all.
My generalized staff scheduler is a small optimization problem: eight people, a week of half-hour slots, about five thousand binary variables. By modern standards that is tiny. So when it started taking minutes to solve — or worse, returning nothing at all — my first reaction was disbelief. This post is the story of CBC vs HiGHS on that exact model, and the four fixes that actually mattered. If your PuLP + CBC model is grinding, some of these will probably apply to you too.
Continue reading “Why a Tiny Scheduling MILP Took Minutes: CBC vs HiGHS”The staff scheduler I built for that Fiverr client did exactly one job. It knew about his clients, his courses, his equipment, his week. It was a good staff scheduling model for precisely one business on Earth. Every sheet name, every constraint, every assumption was his. When I put it online I knew the truth: nobody else could use it without hiring me to rebuild it. So I rebuilt it once, properly, for everyone. This is how the generalization went.
Si alguna vez intentaste armar una ruta de reparto en Google Maps, ya conoces el problema: al llegar a la parada número diez, el botón de “Agregar destino” desaparece. Necesitas hacer 25 entregas y Google te deja planear 10. Llevo más de veinte años construyendo modelos de optimización de rutas para empresas, y en este artículo te muestro cómo hacer una ruta con más de 10 paradas en Google Maps — gratis, sin instalar nada y sin pagar una suscripción.
Continue reading “Cómo hacer una ruta con más de 10 paradas en Google Maps”If you’ve tried to get a straight price out of Route4Me, you’ve probably hit a “contact sales” button instead of a number. That’s the most common complaint I hear, and it’s usually why people start searching for a route4me alternative in the first place. I’ve spent twenty-plus years building routing and scheduling optimization for a living, so I built a free one for the operator who just wants to run a route, not book a demo call first.
