Abstract ideas in programming

I like excuses to have to think about the code I am writing. Last week I spent a couple of days working on a script for deleting the data of users of our demo server. ( Their data is but temporary. )

In deciding which users' data to delete I wondered if I could at least construe the question multi-criterially and have the script make Pareto-optimal choices.

As for what those multiple criteria might be: for a user they could be how long it is since they last used their demo account, how much disk space their data takes and how many inodes it takes. Another criterion for a deletion plan might be how many users the plan affects. For such plans, if a user is to have their data deleted then the plan could target all the users they Pareto-dominate: where that other user logged in even longer ago or uses even more resources without being better on any count. ( Once I worked on what could be a plan-choosing interface. )

The cleanup of accounts on the demo server was just one of the side projects I looked at ( and I kept it a bit simpler than above. )

I greatly appreciate opportunities to think mathematically about my work. ( I also value others' ability to bring such thinking to bear. )