321–330 of 416 posts
Not a fan of these "Coding for fun" things. Code for a job to earn money, yes, a side project where there is an end goal, yes. This seems like a waste of time for working developer. Maybe it's useful for people trying to learn but also becoming pointless now as all Junior dev roles can be done with AI. I mean do plumbers have an advent of plumbing where they try and unblock shit filled toilets for fun?
> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.
In this sense it's accessible: you won't get stuck because of a word you don't understand or a concept you've never heard of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got to agree. I'm even surprised at just how little progress many of my friends and ex-colleagues over the years make given that they hold down reasonable developer jobs.
In order to complete AoC you need more than just the ability to write code and solve problems. You need to find abstract problem-solving motivating. A lot of people don't see the point in competing for social capital (internet points) or expending time and energy on problems that won't live on after they've completed them. I have no evidence to say this, but I'd guess a lot more people give up on AoC because they don…
I think it comes down to experience, exposure to problems, and the ability to recognise what the problem boils down to.
A colleague who is an all round better coder than me might spend 4 hours bashing away trying to solve a problem that I might be able to look at and quickly recongise it is isomorphic to a specific classic Comp Sci or Maths problem and know exactly how best to attack it, saving me a huge amount of time.
Spoiler alert: Take the "Slam Shuffle" in 2019 Day 22 (https://adventofcode.com/2019/day/22). I was lucky that I quickly recognised that each of the actions could be represented as '( a*n + b ) mod noscards' (with a and b specific to the action) and therefore any two actions like this can be combined into the same form. The optimal solution follows relatively simply from this.
Doing all of the previous years means there's not much new ground although Eric always manages to find something each year.
There have also been some absolutely amazing inventions along the way. The IntCode Breakout game (2019) and the adventure game (can't remember the year) both stick in my mind as amazing constructions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got to agree. I'm even surprised at just how little progress many of my friends and ex-colleagues over the years make given that they hold down reasonable developer jobs.
In order to complete AoC you need more than just the ability to write code and solve problems. You need to find abstract problem-solving motivating. A lot of people don't see the point in competing for social capital (internet points) or expending time and energy on problems that won't live on after they've completed them. I have no evidence to say this, but I'd guess a lot more people give up on AoC because they don…
> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.
On sorta the same topic: In the programming world I feel like there's a lot of info "for beginners" and a lot of folks / activities for experts. But that middle ground world is strange... a lot of it is a combo of filling in "basics" and also touching more advanced topics at the same time and the amount of content and just activities filling that in seems very low. I get it though, the middle ground skilled audience…
But also, the middle ground is often just years of practice.
> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.
On sorta the same topic: In the programming world I feel like there's a lot of info "for beginners" and a lot of folks / activities for experts. But that middle ground world is strange... a lot of it is a combo of filling in "basics" and also touching more advanced topics at the same time and the amount of content and just activities filling that in seems very low. I get it though, the middle ground skilled audience…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's totally true. I was doing Advent of Code before I had any training or work in programming at all, and a lot of it can be done with just thinking through the problem logically and using basic problem solving. If you can reason a word problem into what it's asking, then break it down into steps, you're 90% of the way there.
The statistics speak a far different story, I’m afraid.
I support the no global leaderboard. I was in 7th place last year but quickly got bored maintaining the aggressive AI pipeline required to achieve that. If I wanted to maintain pipelines I'd just do work, and there will never be a good way to prevent people from using AI like this. Advent of Code should be fun, thank you for continuing to do it. I'm looking forward to casually playing this year!
Do the problems get harder each day?
Yes! With difficulty usually peaking on the weekends.
I always put it down to overthinking and never arriving at a solution but maybe it was actually a much tougher problem!
Not a fan of these "Coding for fun" things. Code for a job to earn money, yes, a side project where there is an end goal, yes. This seems like a waste of time for working developer. Maybe it's useful for people trying to learn but also becoming pointless now as all Junior dev roles can be done with AI. I mean do plumbers have an advent of plumbing where they try and unblock shit filled toilets for fun?
It's literally just puzzles which have to be solved through code. Solving puzzles is a very normal thing to do for many people