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Advent of Code starts tomorrow/tonight! Are you participating? Do you have any specific plans for this year?
With Advent of Code upon us, I wanted to check out how everyone is planning on participating. If you hadn't heard, this year has been shortened to 12 days along with the removal of the global leaderboard.
- Any changes to how you'll approach this year based on the updated format?
- Are you using an interesting language/approach?
- Any goals you're setting for yourself?
I'm a sucker for puzzles in general, but I also love hearing about everyone else's experiences, so I'm excited to hear what y'all are looking forward to!
My only goal is to try and actually finish the challenge for the first time. I'm a complete amateur when it comes to coding, and all of my Python scripting is scaffolded by heavy use of Stack Overflow (I don't know enough to be able to look at whatever ChatGPT generates and assess if it is good or not). That said, I do enjoy the challenge, and the rush of excitement when I generate a correct answer is second to absolutely none! It being shorter this year will be good for my ability to actually complete the challenge, I think :D
Honestly, depending on the year, you can go quite far with just excel sheets + command line operations on text files! :P I remember I solved maybe 1/3 of a year like this once...
Won't be participating, myself, but good luck!
Yes! I’d like to use it to get a better grasp on Rust, so that’ll be my focus!
That's been my plan for the last two years, but each time I get distracted and end up stopping halfway, then I forget all of Rust again.
Maybe this year's the year?
I usually run a mini competition at work for AoC, but opted not to this year. We never had much participation, and there was some amount of unhealthy competition at play (the department includes people with a wide variety of technical backgrounds, so the "difficulty" differences made it awkward). I'm somewhat disappointed not to be running it, but also excited to just be solving for myself.
I've tried to do a new language each year, and have left it to the last minute to decide. The last few years I did Rust, Haskell, and Smalltalk, all of which were great fun. With the shortened version this year, I'm thinking of going for something a bit more familiar, either a language I've touched a bit in the past (OCaml or Lua) or something more mainstream (Go or Scala). If anyone has any interesting suggestions, let me know!
I did it in 2023 and it was fun, though it looks like I didn't finish it.
12 days should make it less of a commitment, though I suspect I didn't finish it because I couldn't solve a problem, rather than time.
Looking forward to trying to finish it this year. My goal is to finish all 12 problems, and do it in python, which seems to be a handy scripting language that I've never bothered to learn (though it doesn't seem too different from what I do already know).
This first problem is already giving me issues, so that's not a good start.
Feel free to post in the day 1 thread if you need hints!
I did it in '21 and '22, but wasn't able to finish either year. The highest I got was day 16. The problems eventually outgrew my knowledge of algorithms, and it's just difficult to keep it up every day for 25 days as the holidays roll through.
It being 12 days is just what I need to feel like I can jump in this year. ~2 weeks feels a lot more manageable, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that affects the difficulty this time around!
I am doing it in Rust this year to try to act like I have some idea of what I am doing with that language. I intend to check out others' answers after solving it to see if there are language features that I am using improperly or maybe don't know about. Excited for this year!
I've never done Advent of Code before. Normally I'm not super interested in puzzles, but I took a peek at day 1 part 1 and it looks like a fun optimization challenge.
I do want more practice optimizing code, so I'm thinking I'll give AoC a go this year and see how fast I can get my solutions running.
I hope you enjoy it!
The days get harder as they progress, and later days often require either improved algorithms or optimizing for the properties if the inputs. Hopefully some edifying challenges await!
I did it in 2023 and I had a really good time. I was also unemployed at the time (for health reasons).
I can't imagine having the time and energy to do AOC while I also have a job, but I will read the threads! GLHF to everyone participating!