My second was born on November 30 last year. Stupid me thought I could do Advent of Code, manage a toddler and a newborn.
Let's see what excuse I have this year!
Advent of Code 2019
61–70 of 75 posts
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#62I have done it every year, mostly in Rust or C++, with a smattering of other languages (Factor, SML, Haskell). I think I will go with Racket this year. I'm not competing, partly because I don't want to be up at 6AM, and partly because I like it better as a relaxed 15-30 minutes where I learn some new stuff about the environment I'm working with (for example, one year I used CMake to build, just to get some experience…
I think the "competition" part stands out because of the nature of competition. But practically it's a supplement for the people who want that. I'm going to wildly guess that the overwhelming majority of participants aren't seriously competing.
I absolutely love and share your approach. Learn new stuff and grow.
This reminds me of SpaceChem, Magnum Opus, or other games like that. I get a solution and then I optimize the solution and explore other methods of getting there.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#63I'm so excited! I discovered AoC in 2017 and I've participated last year as well. In 2017 I used it as an excuse to practice my JavaScript chops using ES2015 classes. Last year I learned me some Rust while doing the problems, at least up until I had to implement a doubly linked list and gave up on using Rust for the rest of the problems.
Hopefully this year I can make it past day 14. It's strange, but I got stuck or tired on day 15 both years. We'll see how it goes, I'm planning on learning Clojure this year with AoC. I've only started learning the language a bit these past 2 weeks, but I'm sure I'll have fun with it.
To all participants this year: remember to have fun!
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#64As good as AoC is, I think this year I might try and develop the same program (or maybe solve a single one of the puzzles) each day in a different programming language. So one puzzle, 24 languages.. I sorta feel I'd learn more from that rather than sharpening the same knife over and over, perhaps.
Some knives needs more sharpening than others before they get useful. For instance, coming from mostly TS/C# I'm not going to be productive in Rust over night. 24 exercises sounds about right to me.
For me AoC was perfect while learning a bit of Rust last year, but tread carefully if you want to have 2 mutable references to the same value like a circular or doubly linked list.
Good luck and have fun with it!
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#65I'm in the 200 star club and being rather competitive about 2016-2018. I earned at least some global points for each of those years. I started doing the calendar in 2015 but abandonded it halfway through or so. I think it was only in post-partum sorrow after 2016's AoC I went back and did all of 2015. Very much looking forward to this year's edition and am on several leaderboards. I warmly recommend this presentation…
Thanks for linking that, very enjoyable.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#66I'm have seen people being really excited for AoC. What's so special about it?
I'm beginner programmer and even the early puzzles seem very hard, but after some thought you get correct answers and then you can check from youtube how real programmers do it.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#67Will I actually do this past day five this year for a change?
I think I made it to day 6 last year. But not Past the second challenge. I unfortunately have just a little too much going on to tackle it everyday. Maybe this year will be different.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#68Protip: put these challenges into a repo on GitHub. You get the fun of going through the challenges with the added benefit of having work to show off.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some knives needs more sharpening than others before they get useful. For instance, coming from mostly TS/C# I'm not going to be productive in Rust over night. 24 exercises sounds about right to me.
For me AoC was perfect while learning a bit of Rust last year, but tread carefully if you want to have 2 mutable references to the same value like a circular or doubly linked list. Good luck and have fun with it!
AoC is pretty likely to have a graph problem at some point that will give Rust newbies fits! But that will help you learn!
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#70Do 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.
You weren't prevented from anything. You're just really stubborn.
That's not nice. Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments.