Advent of Code 2024
Over the past few years I have participated in Advent of Code. If you are not familiar with it, it is a yearly challenge with daily coding and logic puzzles that are Christmas themed. The puzzles have two parts and some compete for a global leaderboard. Those who are in the first 100 in a given day to solve both parts earn points on the leaderboard. The number of points that you earn depend on your position which is based on who solves the two parts first.
I never compete in AOC. I use it as a way to challenge my knowledge of some computer science concepts like Data Structures and Algorithms, to learn more about a particular coding language's features, and to try out coding exercises that often do not come up in my day-to-day work.
My experince, like others in previous years, has been pretty positive so far; as of last updating this post we are only a week in. It does seem like LLM-assisted solutions is a problem and has a few on the r/adventofcode subreddit pretty upset. But since I don't try to compete for the leaderboard, I don't have much stake in what other people are doing.
I will say that one major impedement that often comes up is how burnt out I get -- since there are daily puzzles, it is relentless. If I have a day that takes me a long time to solve a puzzle, it is pretty exhausting to know that in a few hours, there will be another, harder, puzzle that awaits. That is why my goal for this year is to be OK with solving the puzzles into next year and not force myself to keep up if I have a few days where I just don't feel like staring at my terminal. After all, that is what I do for work and so sometimes it is just a bit too much to go home and do more of that.
If you are interested in Advent Of Code, are preparing for interviews in the tech industry, are a grad student (like I was when I first started doing these) who want to learn some coding or CS, or just like to solve puzzles, I highly recommend participating! It is a lot of fun!
Here are my current solutions: