[tappio]

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.

[TomCoolsTF]

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. ;)

[QuantumGood]

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.

[SomaticPirate]

I wonder how those compare to something like this: https://developers.google.com/optimization/service/schedulin...