391–400 of 580 posts
Which is weird because that is not a thought that entered my mind when I did it for the first time. It was pure fun!
What I hate about AoC is the tons of bullshit about Christmas elves I have to tolerate before getting to the damn point. I mean, I understand they want to make the context entertaining, but sometimes it's like reading a Jira card written by a junior product owner! BTW I love AoC for all else
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It ate my life for a few years in a row, I even managed to finish on Christmas eve twice. Now I don't even look, it turns from fun to stress rather quickly.
I re-read the intro and the fact it mentions leetcode and the like was enough for me to decide that it's an ultimately pointless endeavour for me. I have no interest at all in competitive programming or maths; I spend 40+ hours a week doing programming for work, I want games and challenges that pull me away from that so I continue to have a life outside of my job.
Note it's a single-use game.
https://boardgamegeek.com/geeksearch.php?action=search&objec...
(I don't see any reference to leetcode, but people can approach Advent of Code however they like. I'm certainly not waking up at 5:50 to race for a solution.)
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It ate my life for a few years in a row, I even managed to finish on Christmas eve twice. Now I don't even look, it turns from fun to stress rather quickly.
I re-read the intro and the fact it mentions leetcode and the like was enough for me to decide that it's an ultimately pointless endeavour for me. I have no interest at all in competitive programming or maths; I spend 40+ hours a week doing programming for work, I want games and challenges that pull me away from that so I continue to have a life outside of my job.
My daily grind is like carefully scaffolding and repainting a 50 storey office building made of typed, modular, spaghetti couples Python ML code.
AOC in ipython, by comparison, is like doodling pictures with a brush pen!
It is very enjoyable and also why leetcode is a little silly for interviews: convince me you can I want to know a candidate can flawlessly paint several hundred square feet of wall, not doodle a cat cartoon.
(Or, away from the analogy, the software equivalents. Can you safely progress business goals as a member of a team on a legacy codebase that’s partly evolving on the cutting edge and also partly rotting on the trailing edge? I don’t care if you can build a naive implementation of our trading system… sorry I mean an Elephant Auction… in 90 minutes!)
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In 2019 he built up about 12 challenges using a VM, for Intcode, you had to construct. It was poorly received because without a working version (developed over the first few Intcode challenges), you couldn't solve the rest of them. He hasn't done anything like that since, though I thought it was probably the more interesting series of challenges. The problem with continuity across days is that the later days can be b…
People are skipping days? I usually drop out when I'm stuck on some day. 2019 was my favorite.
The first year was the best year for me. It was really fun and I think I got 22/24 days done. After that my participation rate has been shocking, I really want to do it but I get this weird anxiety that I'm not quick enough. Which is weird because that is not a thought that entered my mind when I did it for the first time. It was pure fun!
I can't explain why but doing AoC is always interesting, and doing LeetCode which is supposed to be similar is always very depressing. Wishing everyone a fun challenge. This year I will be practicing F# and hope some of you will give it a try too :) https://github.com/neon-sunset/AOC24/blob/master/day1.fsx
AoC would be more stressful if you had to solve a problem in 30 minutes for a highly competitive job.
This years challenge for me: write it in C without the standard library or an allocator. Has to be runnable on an STM32 with 32kb of SRAM. I tried doing it in Assembly two years ago, ended up spending hours and hours writing an Assembly standard library, then gave up and switched to Rust...
I think there might end up being some problems which will be very challenging to solve with those resource constraints - namely memory. You will probably have to be pretty clever with your solutions. I remember one of my naive brute force solutions from last year ended up allocating gigabtyes of memory. There were obviously more efficient solutions, but some of the inputs are pretty large and so hefty allocations mig…
I do allow myself a 5Gb disk to which I can page out memory.
Ah here it is again, 25 days of writing increasingly complex input parsers.