I wrote program to solve the cutting stock problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_stock_problem) for a personal project. I couldn't (or didn't want to) use any existing program for it because my stock involved cutting pieces shaped like either /---/, /---|, or |---| and I didn't want to waste material on the 45 cut.

I find it interesting that the description of Brady's program to optimize search for BB(4) by cutting out search subtrees whose differences don't matter is fairly close to a description of what I did to make my program fast.