Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

My wife and i just went through this for our wedding. A few remarks from that experience that might be helpful:

1. Versions matter - she'd often make a draft and want to tell me "ok tell me if you like this better than the previous version". Id just compare the cells above to the cells below.

2. We organized people based on common interests - these people are very into music, these are very into home renovations, these people work in tech...etc. Tagging people with "attributes" and letting the system try optimize for as much overlap as possible would have been amazing.

3. Warn me of duplicates - sometimes in the copy paste madeness, we'd double up someone.

4. Import - We almost missed someone due to me skipping a line in the initial transription of their name into the spreadsheet.

5. At the end of the day guests need to find their seat. I made a QR code that linked to a website where people could type their name to find their table (https://andrewmcgrath.info/wedding) we didn't want to use a big board, it was 1 more thing to make (the website was a 2 hr project i did the day before) and the QR codes were just print outs we put in dollar store photo frames at the entrance, the bar and at the end of the day...we got great feedback over this. With the guest lists, you could easily automate making someone this website.

Good luck!

I had to write a piece of code to manage 200+ dogs at a kenneling facility, sorted by temperament, across a Gantt chart, with lists of friends and enemies which could stay together or must never be together - coming and going at different times. Additionally, dogs and kennels are both color-coded and certain types of dogs can only stay in certain types of kennels. Some dogs cannot share a kennel at all; kennels have a max limit of 1, 2 or 3 dogs; and some kennels are premium-priced.

In practice, the "optimal" solution depends on what you're optimizing for. In my case, it was maximizing the number of dogs that could board on any given night. This involved looking for open paths - since dogs can be moved around daily if necessary. Then rule out any based on the constraints: Prevent enemy conflict, limit to max occupancy, etc. After that, the preference is for boarding them in a kennel with a friend if possible, however there are trade-offs here in whether this creates too many extra moves... e.g. if a friend is coming in for one night of a dog's 7-night stay, we don't prefer to move. So the third priority, which occasionally overrides the second priority, is minimizing the number of moves which add work for employees. To do that, we look for the longest stretch open at each move branch, ranking them by number of friends descending, barring any with enemies.

As you can imagine, this was way too complicated and branching, so the system prunes the option tree at each necessary move down to a few dozen possibilities and continues down each of those paths, then ranks all the paths for the user to choose from.

In other words, a lot of the decisions for optimizing it (in the non-mathematical sense) were about limiting its output to a manageable number of reasonably good choices. Enemies create a hard limit on the number of spots available. Friends are optional (but good for business).

Great for schools!

If you click on the Optimize, it's already a shuffling. I could add shuffling from there, but it really won't affect optimization too much, as the underlying state is similar.

I can definitely add randomization for fun, but I'm not sure how many people will use it yet. Trying to keep buttons to a minimum at first.

Have a link to your tool?

Ah yeah i see the versioning now. I didnt get what was happening there before but i do now. This feels more to me like an audit log, which while helpful doesnt really do what i had hoped. Seeing 1 person move at a time isnt super practical, our edits were more like "these 10 people are now in different spots" and i just want to compare before to after, the in between while interesting isn't the visual im hoping to discover.

Interesting point about duplicates and names. We had a lot of Andrew's (including me) but we didn't have any identical matches if we included last names (which fortunatly everyone had). I guess as long as you can acknowledge them and have the warnings go away that would be enough.

Checkout the UX of the auto-complete for that website i made. My goal was so it would basically find your table as quick as possible, and the website is designed only for phones as i assumed the number of guests that brought a laptop would be somewhat limited :P

I considered turning that website into it's own little startup, but frankly, the idea of running a business with no repeat customers (or...with a duration between purchases so low that i'd basically be acquiring them every time) was not very attractive to me. Then again, everything else i've worked on in between has been worthless, so i might as well have haha!

Sounds great, yeah i think having a free lead gen offering that you can somehow cross-sell into another product line is the way to work here. Once you have some "customer data" like "size of wedding" you are positioned to experiment with suggestions.

Good luck!