Waylight · the bench
Five of us, and two seats we mean to fill.
Everyone here has worked a yard or built the instruments for one. The empty seats are listed at the same size as the full ones, because they are the same decision.
- Mara AldanaFounder · twelve years of yards
- Tobias BrekkeSystems · port scheduling
- Sade OkonkwoDesign · instrument panels
- Ilya RennerReliability · rail signalling
- Nour HadidField · the crews we sell to
Waylight · where we are
Twelve people, four cities, eighteen hours.
We hire where the yards are. That gives us most of the working day covered without asking anyone to answer at three in the morning.
- RotterdamNetherlands55people06:00 – 15:00 UTC
- GdańskPoland33people06:00 – 15:00 UTC
- HalifaxCanada22people12:00 – 21:00 UTC
- TacomaUnited States22people15:00 – 24:00 UTC
06:00 – 24:00 UTC covered by someone on shift
1212in total
00:00 to 06:00 UTC, nobody is working. Urgent pages wake an on-call engineer; everything else waits for Rotterdam.
Waylight · how we decide
Four rules, and what each one costs us.
These settle arguments internally. We publish them so you can hold us to them, and so you can tell when we have broken one.
The gate before the office
Every feature is designed for the person standing outside in the weather first, and adapted for the desk afterwards. Never the other way round.
What it costs us
Office reporting is plainer than our competitors', and that is a choice, not a backlog item.
A plan that cannot explain itself is not published
The scheduler withholds any board whose reasoning it cannot state, and flags it for a person instead.
What it costs us
About one morning a fortnight arrives with a flag rather than a plan.
Leaving is a workflow
Export everything, any time, without asking. Cancellation is a settings page, not a phone call.
What it costs us
We lose accounts we could have kept by making them hard to leave.
Small enough to name
You should always be able to find out who made a decision about the product you rely on.
What it costs us
It caps how fast we can grow, which we have decided we can live with.
Waylight · fit
Who this is for, and who it is not.
Both lists are real. The second one cost us three deals last year and saved us six refunds, which we consider a good trade.
Built for
A yard where the morning is decided at the gate
Everything here starts from the board a crew reads in gloves. That is the whole design.
Two to twelve crews sharing constrained gear
One crane, two yards, and a reshuffle that has to reach both — this is the case the scheduler was written for.
Anyone answering audits from memory
Shifts close into a record you can quote, so a review stops being an archaeology project.
Not for
A single operator with a notebook
You would spend more time telling Waylight what you are doing than doing it. The notebook is genuinely better.
→ Come back at your third crew.
Anyone planning quarters rather than mornings
Waylight has no opinion beyond about ten days out. It is an instrument for the shift, not for the budget.
→ Keep your planning tool; we integrate with it.
A yard that needs the plan to be unarguable
Ours prints its reasoning and invites the argument. If you want an instruction nobody questions, this is the wrong shape entirely.
→ You want a dispatch system, not a scheduler.
If you are on the right and think we are wrong about you, say so — we have been wrong before, and we would rather hear it now than after you have paid.
Waylight · the part you are stuck on
You are probably thinking one of these.
- “The crews will not use it.”
- They use it or they do not — you will know inside a week, and the free yard costs you nothing if the answer is no.
- “We tried something like this in 2019.”
- Probably an office tool pointed at a yard. This one starts at the gate; if it does not survive gloves and glare, it has failed on its own terms.
- “We do not have time to roll anything out.”
- One yard, one afternoon, no migration. The whiteboard stays up as long as you want it to.
- “What if we want out?”
- Export everything whenever you like, keep the files, and stop paying from the settings page. No call, no retention offer.