Advent of Code 2019
adventofcode.com
Advent of Code 2019
1–10 of 75 posts
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#2Will I actually do this past day five this year for a change?
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#3Excited as ever for this. Got my toolkit ready. Trying to decide if I want to aim for something besides speed this year; maybe visualizations, or literate code. Given my current work, I probably won't focus on a new language.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#4Will I actually do this past day five this year for a change?
Outside of family, work, and exercise, I have time and energy for approximately one personal project.
AoC got to be a bit of a grind for me last year. Something came up, and I missed a few days towards the end. I told myself I was going to go back and finish, but I never did.
I'm tempted to try again this year, but I don't know. I already have projects languishing in need of some attention. On the other hand, it's lots of fun.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#5I'm have seen people being really excited for AoC. What's so special about it?
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#6This year I really want to try to use this to learn Rust. Are there any good practices or crates to handle file input like most of the problems give?
As I recall, most of the time the input is delineated by spaces or linebreaks and it helps if you can carve it up easily right off the bat.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#7I'm have seen people being really excited for AoC. What's so special about it?
You're presented with a pretty unique, bite-size programming challenge every day. Everything is themed around Christmas so there's a short story about how you have to help Santa's elves fix their machinery or something like that.
Different people get slightly different problems, so you have to do your own work to solve for your puzzle input. You feed it back into the site to see if it was correct or not. Getting a problem right was a great feeling, and it progressively unlocks more of a Christmas-themed ASCII art picture.
I would have a tough time explaining it to someone who doesn't do any programming, but it's free to try if you're curious!
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#8I'm have seen people being really excited for AoC. What's so special about it?
It’s a neatly polished programming challenge site which is both communal and competitive, there’s a bonus score (I think) for completing on the same day a challenge is released, there’s a leaderboard race for the first 100 answers each day (typically all gone within 1-2 minutes after midnight) and there’s a subreddit where people share their solutions in all kinds of languages, and it’s nothing to do with competing for a FAANG job interview.
But apart from that it is “just” coding challenges with a story wrapped around them, and if you don’t like those, you won’t care for it.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#9This year I really want to try to use this to learn Rust. Are there any good practices or crates to handle file input like most of the problems give? As I recall, most of the time the input is delineated by spaces or linebreaks and it helps if you can carve it up easily right off the bat.
You can do that with the standard library, just do File::read_to_string and String::lines or String::split_whitespace.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#10Do you still need to sign up in order to use this? I've been wanting to do AoC for the past few years, but the mandatory signup prevented me from doing so.
Just give me the tasks. I don't want any leaderboards or anything like that.
Edit: The aspect of customized tasks does not require sign-ups. Just use a cookie or something.