I write about my everyday life as optimization expert, where I translate business requirements to mathematical formulars, then to software -- and all the way back again.
I don’t tell my doctor the whole truth – and that’s how I work too
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Hello Reader! At the dentist, I had to fill a form. I wrote "Software Developer" as my profession. The doctor was satisfied — he knew I worked at a computer and not with heavy machinery. Exactly the information he needed. But my work is much more complex. If someone asks me at a party, I don’t say “Software Developer.” My job is about finding concepts, communicating with teams, and solving problems. Writing code is just the final step — implementing a good solution. So why don’t I tell the doctor I’m a chemical engineer or consultant? Because that would lead to the wrong assumptions—dangerous chemicals, heavy machinery. Instead, I keep it simple. I apply the same principle at work. A computer doesn’t need every detail to optimize a production process, and a team leader doesn’t want to be overwhelmed with mathematical jargon. It’s about providing the right information at the right time—only what truly matters. Less is often more. The goal: a simple solution that works in the long-term. Until the next iteration! Tim Varelmann Complicated Decisions - Simply Automated! Follow me on LinkedIn |
Bluebird Briefings
I write about my everyday life as optimization expert, where I translate business requirements to mathematical formulars, then to software -- and all the way back again.
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...
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...
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...