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Comment by bcx | Hacker News Reader

Scheduling is such a hard problem. What other tools do people use for scheduling shift workers?

I built schedulejs (http://bunkat.github.io/schedule/) when I needed to solve this problem for my own services. It lets you define very complete schedules (working hours, vacations, dependencies, breaks, etc) and then generate conforming schedules. It's a library and not a stand-alone tool, but it wouldn't be hard to build something on top of it.

That looks great -- and if you're ever looking to to some JS work in SF, shoot me an email: dave@pagerduty.com.

With scheduling, the hardest part seems to be the UI. It's the MS Word problem, everybody wants a simpler UI, but everyone uses has one complicated task and it's a different task.

Totally agree and that's why I open sourced the scheduler library and not a UI for it :) Schedule UIs should always be created specific to their usage domain otherwise they get out of control pretty quickly. Love PagerDuty by the way, but I'm not even a developer so I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want me mucking around in your code base.

I was impressed by TaskJuggler's extensive data modeling for managing projects and people:

  http://www.taskjuggler.org/

Never used it on a real project, though.

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