This is a great opportunity to use new languages and get a feel of how communities take on newcomers! I tried Clojure a few years back and I got a warm welcome, so I'd like to extend an invitation to anyone considering using Clojure for this year's puzzles, head over to the Clojurians Slack and the #adventofcode channel and hang out. There's no competitiveness and people just like to compare notes and discuss approaches. A lot of Europe representation too!
Advent of Code 2020
51–60 of 86 posts
Re: Advent of Code 2020
#52I've always found AoC to be added stress during a time of the year I'm not really running a stress-deficit. I find the competitive aspect a pretty big turn off. I usually get a few puzzles in and then burn out, because I can't keep up with the people who do it every day (I don't even use my computer every day). I wish the scoring didn't prioritize timeliness. This is really the sort of thing I'd enjoy cranking out on…
I always like to do some puzzles but it takes me quite long to solve them, so far I've burned out after a couple of days every year I've tried it. This year I'm going to try to use Elixir, a language I've started learning the past year, hoping I can at least get past day 5 this year.
I did it in 2018 in Elixir when José Valim, the language's creator, has publicly streamed his solutions [1] at mid-day (in Europe), so you had quite some time to resolve them yourself and then later watch him go through them.
I will be forever grateful to him for this opportunity.
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Re: Advent of Code 2020
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you must look at the scores, you can now make your own private leaderboards. If you're the only member of the leaderboard, then you'll win every challenge.
This is dismissive and unnecessarily condescending. Is it possible to opt out of the public leaderboard entirely? Because if not - perhaps things have changed - the stressful part about AoC is having a publicly viewable permanent score based on arbitrary and unfair criteria. Simply “not looking at it” isn’t enough. I did AoC a few years ago and realized that I had my GitHub profile associated to “middle-of-the-road”…
I don't really understand this perspective at all. I've done a few of the previous AoCs to various levels of completion.
I don't think I've ever been quick enough to figure on the leaderboard. I'm not a competitive person so that aspect of it doesn't really appeal to me and I've been able to totally ignore it every year without it really intruding on me or causing me any stress related problems.
You're imaging a scenario which doesn't really exist with this "ignorant recruiter" situation. Why not just worry about that if / when it really does become a problem...?
We can look at a myriad of potential stress factors that come out of the design of so many every day items. We'd be overrun with worries if let them dominate our mind.
Just chill out and try to ignore the competitive aspect, its not that difficult
Re: Advent of Code 2020
#54I'm curious if my debug visualizer extension for VS Code could be helpful for solving this kind of puzzles ( https://github.com/hediet/vscode-debug-visualizer/blob/maste... ). Might be one of the few use cases where it can really shine.
I had this plugin installed for a long time. The idea is really awesome, but it's just like debugging frameworks. Most of the time I just use console.log, or in this case the debugger instead of powerful tools.
Also many times I don't actually debug loops and list mutations.
Re: Advent of Code 2020
#55Anyone else planning on rotating languages? I think that using a different language every day is too much of a stretch for me, but I plan to switch between C++, Rust and Julia.
Re: Advent of Code 2020
#56Why Advent of Code, how is it different to the million other coding challenges online? I never participated, only looked at some of the puzzles.
The quality of the puzzles. They're 2-stagers, where the first stage is generally to ensure you've understood the problem, and the second is a "twist" like a vastly expanded problem space.
Re: Advent of Code 2020
#57I've always found AoC to be added stress during a time of the year I'm not really running a stress-deficit. I find the competitive aspect a pretty big turn off. I usually get a few puzzles in and then burn out, because I can't keep up with the people who do it every day (I don't even use my computer every day). I wish the scoring didn't prioritize timeliness. This is really the sort of thing I'd enjoy cranking out on…
The midnight release in the Eastern timezone doesn't help either. I'd assume this is convenient for West coasters. And probably excludes Europeans altogether. I'm making mass general assumptions here...
No, most of the Europeans I talked to spend an hour or two before work. (2019 was my first time and I did that as well)
Re: Advent of Code 2020
#58I've always found AoC to be added stress during a time of the year I'm not really running a stress-deficit. I find the competitive aspect a pretty big turn off. I usually get a few puzzles in and then burn out, because I can't keep up with the people who do it every day (I don't even use my computer every day). I wish the scoring didn't prioritize timeliness. This is really the sort of thing I'd enjoy cranking out on…
[deleted]
Re: Advent of Code 2020
#59Anyone else planning on rotating languages? I think that using a different language every day is too much of a stretch for me, but I plan to switch between C++, Rust and Julia.
I did 20 languages last year and I'm gonna stick to 1-2 this year :P Wasn't exactly stressful, but it didn't help being quick and having nice solutions. Wrote a summary: https://f5n.org/blog/2019/advent-of-code-2019/
Re: Advent of Code 2020
#60that damn intcode computer from last year is still giving me PTSD. Had a bug in it that somehow didn't show up in the first three challenges, took me forever to find.
I had one of the funniest bugs in my whole programming life with intcode. It manifested itself in the last puzzle (iirc) with the maze. I did not find a single item, because the instruction used for this was buggy and the rest of the problem was 100% ok.