Hello Reader! Right now, across the United States, Canada and Mexico, millions of people are behaving in ways they would never admit to at the office. Norwegian fans are rowing on an escalator like it's an Olympic final. Dutch fans are doing 'naar links naar rechts' in the street, a whole crowd swaying left, then right, as one. Egyptian fans are dancing through the streets of Vancouver after Egypt's first ever World Cup win, Mo Salah and the whole squad right there with them. This is the...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader! Should your forecast lie to your optimizer? It sounds absurd. But sit with it for a moment. + first briefing of the month --> find a personal update from me at the end! The Forecast That Wasn't Wrong Enough You've probably been there. The forecast looked reasonable. The model ran cleanly. Then demand came in stronger than expected, capacity hit its ceiling, and the business absorbed the hit: penalties, backlog, unhappy customers, maybe some lost accounts. The natural, human...
6 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader! Optimization Has a PR Problem! The moment people hear words like mixed-integer programming or convex optimization, their brain quietly shuts the door. It sounds abstract. Mathematical. Slightly dangerous. Yet the funny thing is this: The core ideas behind optimization can be explained with just three surprisingly simple mental pictures. Today I’ll show you those three metaphors. And at the end I also have a small personal update for the start of the new month. You need to...
7 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader! Humans don’t struggle with optimization because it’s too logical.They struggle because decision-making was never purely logical to begin with. Why Optimization Feels Unnatural to Humans There is a quiet discomfort that shows up again and again when decisions are handed over to computers. Not always loudly.Not always explicitly.But it’s there. Even in technically sophisticated teams, and even among people who fully understand the mathematics, there is often a moment of hesitation...
8 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader! There’s a special kind of excitement that hits when a dream-fit client reaches out at the worst possible moment.That’s exactly what happened last year around this time. My calendar was overflowing.Commitments everywhere.Zero space for anything new. And then their message landed in my inbox. Clear. Focused. High-stakes.Exactly the kind of problem Bluebird Optimization exists to solve. So I made space where there was none. Why does the fit of a client change the entire trajectory...
11 months ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader! Optimization is one of the most powerful technologies of our time — and yet, it rarely makes headlines. I'm currently returning from the Gurobi Summit 2025 in Vienna. Thus, this newsletter will be a little different: let’s start with three quotes worth highlighting from the event: My personal Top-3 of Quotes “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” – Bill Gates, 2004 This quote was shown at the Summit, alongside many others from world-class figures. And it stuck with me. Not...
11 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader! with wind and rain becoming ever-present, summer has officially given way to autumn. In this episode of Bluebird Briefings I'll give you a little summary of what happened in the world of optimization over the summer of 2025: Major Industry News Gurobi released the State of Mathematical Optimization 2025 report. It contains results from what's probably the biggest survey among optimization practitioners. The findings are impressive. They attest to the growth of optimization as...
12 months ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader! Every Superhero Has an Origin Story For GAMSPy’s machine learning superpowers, that story begins with a package called OMLT. OMLT is short for Optimization and Machine Learning Toolkit. It’s a package that extends Pyomo to integrate machine learning models directly into optimization problems. Because OMLT supports ONNX interoperability, you can take a model trained in TensorFlow, Keras, or PyTorch and embed it into a Pyomo optimization model. It also happens to be the package...
12 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader! Here is an intuitive description of the inner workings of 4 different approaches to solving optimization problems: 🔹 Heuristics: Fast & Practical A heuristic is a rule of thumb for decision-making. It doesn’t guarantee the best solution, but it’s often good enough. A strong heuristic has at least one of these qualities: ✅ It finds high-quality solutions quickly. ✅ It delivers decent results with minimal effort. Even if a heuristic fails often, it can still be valuable if it's...
about 1 year ago • 2 min read