I recently built a small tool called Shift Schedule Maker . At first, I thought shift scheduling would be a fairly straightforward problem. You have employees. You have shifts. You assign people to shifts. That sounds like a simple table. But once I started building it, I realized scheduling is less like filling out a calendar and more like solving a constraint problem. A valid schedule is not necessarily a good schedule. For example, the system has to think about things like: Does every shift have enough people? Is anyone assigned to two overlapping shifts? Is someone working too many days in a row? Are night shifts distributed fairly? Are weekends always falling on the same person? What happens when one person is unavailable? Can the schedule still work if the team size is small? The tricky part is that these rules often conflict with each other. You might want perfect fairness, but still need full coverage. You might want to respect everyone’s availability, but only have a limited number of people.…