Blog - Page 23 of 43 - Kind of Lost

Three Files. One Web App. Zero Web Development Experience.

At some point during this project I stepped back and looked at what we’d built.

Three files. A working web application. Deployable for $7 a month. Zero web development experience going in.

That felt worth writing down.

The three files that make up a Python Flask web app

Three Bugs That Would Have Stayed Hidden in Excel

When you convert an optimization model from Excel to standalone Python, you expect to do some work. You expect to rewrite the data loading, restructure the variable definitions, test the output. What you don’t expect is for the model to fail in three distinct ways, each one caused by something the Excel version was handling silently without you knowing it.

Handling PuLP solver errors in a Python optimization model

That’s what happened here. Three bugs. All real. All the kind that would have stayed invisible forever if the model had stayed in the spreadsheet.

PuLP, MILP, and CBC: The Alphabet Soup Behind Your Schedule

PuLP is a Python library for writing optimization models. MILP stands for Mixed Integer Linear Program. CBC is an open-source solver. Together, they’re what makes the Staff Scheduler work — and together, they represent something I find genuinely interesting: the fact that problems that used to require expensive commercial software and specialized hardware can now be solved on a laptop, for free, in a few seconds.

PuLP, MILP and CBC working together in a Python optimization model

Let me explain what’s actually happening under the hood.

The Client Who Changed His Mind (And Why I Finished the Job Anyway)

Years ago, I was doing gigs on Fiverr. Mostly Excel work — macros, pivot tables, solver models. I had a profile and a handful of listings, and I’d written about that whole love/hate experience back in 2017 (short version: the clients who treat you like a vending machine are the price you pay for the ones who bring you genuinely interesting problems). One day, a genuinely interesting problem showed up.

A training company needed help scheduling their staff. Multiple clients, multiple courses, multiple instructors, limited hours, shared equipment, weird simultaneous constraints. Classic Operations Research territory. I said yes.

Continue reading “The Client Who Changed His Mind (And Why I Finished the Job Anyway)”

WordPress Optimization Results: Before, After, and What’s Still Left

This is the final post in a six-part series documenting a full technical overhaul of this site — kindoflost.com — using Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic. If you’ve followed along from Post 1, you’ve seen every fix in detail. This post is the recap: what the site looked like before, what it looks like now, what we’d do differently, and what’s still on the to-do list.