Geoffrey De Smet
Co-Founder CTO at Timefold
Ghent, East Flanders, Belgium
Summary
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RockstarGeoffrey De Smet is a veteran software engineer and entrepreneur with 18 years of experience building and leading open-source AI optimization projects; he is Co-Founder and CTO of Timefold and the creator of OptaPlanner. He architected and shipped OptaPlanner since 2006, led its growth at Red Hat, and has deep expertise in constraint solvers, scheduling and vehicle routing applied across enterprise use cases. Geoffrey combines hands-on backend development, DevOps/release automation and occasional full‑stack work—evidenced by contributions from core rule engines (Drools) to web UIs and build tooling. He’s an active maintainer on high-profile Apache and KIE projects, improving scoring frameworks, integration tests and cloud-ready runtimes. Based in Ghent, Belgium, he pairs academic rigor in AI planning with pragmatic engineering, often surfacing non-obvious scoring and metric improvements that materially boost solver quality.
18 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
English, Dutch, French
Stackoverflow
26,852reputation
2.0mreached
1,248answers
110questions
java
top-1%
unzip
top-1%
algorithm
top-5%
migration
top-5%
maven
top-5%
zip
top-5%
Github Skills (69)
optimizers10
testing10
solver10
unzip10
javas10
automation10
junit10
constraint10
build-automation10
file-processing10
maven10
compression10
rest-api10
optimization10
gwt10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
apache/incubator-kie-optaplanner
Sep 2007 - Jan 2023
AI constraint solver in Java to optimize the vehicle routing problem, employee rostering, task assignment, maintenance scheduling, conference scheduling and other planning problems.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:989 reviews, 6457 commits, 879 PRs in 15 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Geoffrey primarily contributed to the rock tour example within the OptaPlanner project. The commits involved modifying the domain model and file I/O components, especially related to the calculation and presentation of travel time metrics. This included features for calculating weekly driving time, as well as modifications to improve the output displayed within the application. Additionally, the user improved the implementation for scoring and penalizing based on the time related to the various locations.
problemslocal-searchsimulated-annealingconstraint-programminglogistics
apache/incubator-kie-optaplanner-quickstarts
Sep 2020 - Jan 2023
OptaPlanner quick starts for AI optimization: many use cases shown in many different technologies.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:212 reviews, 80 commits, 107 PRs in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Geoffrey primarily contributed to adding generic score types to various classes related to OptaPlanner scoring. The user updated code in multiple quickstarts, including facility location, maintenance scheduling, and school timetabling projects. These updates focused on integrating and utilizing the ScoreManager within the Quarkus and Spring Boot applications. The user also updated the Kotlin school timetabling quickstart, modifying domain classes and test files.
casesoptimization-algorithmsgradlepythonoperations-research
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