2010 · Deputy Venue Manager, Athletes' Village

Vancouver Olympics

At the 2010 Winter Olympics I was deputy venue manager for the Athletes’ Village in Whistler. The job came with a problem: roughly five thousand staff and volunteers to schedule across seventy-seven days, matching everyone’s availability against what the Games actually needed. The standard approach was to do it by hand, budgeted in weeks.

So I taught myself enough code to write the software that did it instead, and used it to run the Village’s workforce.

The organizing committee never used it again. It wasn’t built to reward better tools; it was built to follow the rules. A missed legacy, and the one time the pattern didn’t take — the institution has to want the change, and this one didn’t.