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0 pointseitland3y ago0 comments

Was reminded the other day about the time I arrived early at the night shift to learn a particular manual "scheduling" technique (how to match single size and double size packages to hundreds of deliverables, and I think there was some options too).

I saw the excel file, asked for 5 minutes, came back after 15 and had solved the problem to such a degree that it went from wasting two hours for two teamleaders on every night we did this job to being almost trivial for one to do in 5 minutes.

And the solution was trivial. Like really trivial. But no one had thought of it before : )

Second best probably when I saved a messed up server in US (an person on site hadn't noticed the . in rm -rf ./bin and had proceeded to use sudo without thinking, as every Linux user does when they go through that dangerous phase).

I realized I still had one ssh connection to the server, realized either scp or rsync or something was in sbin (or somewhere else) and we could use it to copy the necessary binaries to get it back on track.

This easily saved us a 3 days (RHEL with Oracle 11g something easily took days to get right and it also was a massive pain to do).

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newman3143y ago

I'd love to learn more about how you solved this scheduling problem.

eitlandOP3y ago

First, you might have overestimated the complexity of it. I tried to describe it as uncomplicated as possible without giving up the exact details of what it was, but I admit I might have failed at it. It was utterly trivial.

Basically we produced single packs and two-packs of a product and customers would order 1-n of them, sometimes with customizations.

The trivial but immensely tedious job was to make production and packing lists that took this into account.

I.e. with these orders:

Customer 1: 5 packs Customer 2: 3 packs

That would end up like

Customer 1: 2x2-packs + 1 single pack

Customer 2: 1x2pack + 1 single pack modification x

Total:

5 2-packs

+ 1 single pack

+ 1 single pack modification x

Of course a real production run would have hundreds of these.

What I did once I got hold of the list was just to integer division (or what it is called) by 2 on each row to get the number of double packs in one column, something like (original number - 2x doublePacks) to get a 1 or 0 for single pack and then make a sum at the bottom for all columns.

I might have made som checksums too.

As for modifications I cannot remember anymore, I might have added some color or something, but once the immensely tedious first part was done it wasn't much of a problem IIRC.

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