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”From One Client’s Rules to Any Team: A General Scheduler
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.
Cómo hacer una ruta con más de 10 paradas en Google Maps
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”Route4Me Alternative: A Free Optimizer, No Sales Call
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.
A Withdrawal Rate Calculator That Draws Down to Zero
After I put the Roth conversion tool online, the question I kept getting wasn’t about conversions at all. It was simpler and scarier: “OK, but how much can I actually spend?” Almost every withdrawal rate calculator answers that by multiplying your savings by 4% and calling it a day. So I added a mode to my own optimizer that throws the flat percentage out and solves for the real number — the most you can spend every year while drawing every account down to zero by the end of the plan.
Continue reading “A Withdrawal Rate Calculator That Draws Down to Zero”