Last year I read the part about Non-standard evaluation in Hadley Wickham's Book (http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Computing-on-the-language.html) when I thought that this can be used to build a DSL for modelling MIPs. Then I developed a quick PoC over the weekend which evolved into this package. And that initial impulse to work on this topic was probably inspired by the JuMP (https://jump.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) project in julia which I had used for a graph layouting problem before (and I guess by other modelling DSLs I have used / played with in the past).

In general I just like the theory and practical applications of MILPs, however I don't work on these problems in my day job. I am just hobbyist.