pgte
Joined 18 years ago
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Member since
Aug 11
Software Engineer Tech writer Curious. My opinions are my own.
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Comment · 11 months ago
You are spot on about the market saturation and the "moat" being integrations rather than just the algorithm. It is a brutal space.
I am actually building a new tool in this space (TimeClout.com) precisely because, despite those thousands of existing solutions, I saw friends running a medical unit still drowning in spreadsheets. The "proven" enterprise vendors were often too rigid or expensive for their specific needs, and the lighter tools couldn't handle complex constraints like "fairness" (e.g., ensuring everyone shares the burden of inconvenient shifts equally).
My wedge isn't just "another roster app," but focusing on the constraint solver itself—using AI to automate that complex Tetris game of qualifications, rest times, and fairness metrics that most managers do manually. I’m also betting on an open-core model (repo is at djinilabs/timeclout) because I think the logic should be transparent and hackable.
I’d be curious if you think a "better solver + open source" approach is enough to compete against the heavy HR/payroll integrators you mentioned?
Comment · 11 months ago
This is a huge pain point—validating this problem is definitely not the hard part! I’ve been tackling the exact same "Spreadsheet Tetris" nightmare with TimeClout ( https://timeclout.com ).
We actually just open-sourced our solution because we realized that while the scheduling interface needs to be simple, the optimization logic (fairness, constraints, sales matching) is where the real complexity lives. Since you're building something similar, you might find our approach interesting—we use a constraint satisfaction AI solver to handle the heavy lifting.
We’re currently looking for beta testers to stress-test the scheduler in real-world hospitality scenarios. Since you're deep in this space, I'd love to hear your take on our approach vs. what you're building.
Best of luck with your tool—the market definitely needs more than just "digital spreadsheets."
Comment · 1 year ago
Why your mental model of dates is broken, how programming languages gaslight us about time, and how Decipad’s interval-based approach fixes it.
Comment · 1 year ago
While tRPC offers great developer experience with end-to-end type safety, GraphQL's client-side query customization provides architectural flexibility that shouldn't be overlooked. A deep dive into why GraphQL's advantages remain relevant.
Comment · 1 year ago
How we designed and implemented a reactive, type-safe, spreadsheet-inspired language with real-time updates, dependency tracking, and incremental computation.