Advent of Code

In 2020 I discovered https://adventofcode.com/ via the Python Discord server.

This repo contains my solutions to the Daily Challenges in folders by year. Each day also has the problem description and any lessons I learned.

Event Years

• 2015
  • Second Problem Set Tackled (April 2021 - Sept 2021)
  • Originally solved with Python
  • New languages for this set: Ruby and Perl
  • 50 Stars Collected
    • 20210828 - Reached 34 stars without skipping any Days/Parts. This put me in a tie with my score at the end of 2020 when I was doing it live Dec 2020.
    • 20210919 - First set of Advent of Code I completed with all 50 stars!!!!
  • Nerdy tidbit: At end of 2015 repo code was split as follows:
    • 63.6% Python
    • 18.7% Ruby
    • 17.6% Perl
    • 0.1% Shell
• 2016
  • Third Problem Set Tackled (Oct 2021 - )
  • Old languages for this set: Python, Ruby, Perl
  • New languages for this set: Haskell and Go
  • 33 stars Collected so Far
  • 20221029 Reached 150 stars total for the repo
• 2017
  • Sixth Problem Set Tackled (Dec 2022 - )
  • Old languages for this set: Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, Go
  • New languages for this set: Rust and Julia (“One hard one and one easy one”)
  • started before done with 2016 to try and get to 200 stars for the repo before the end of 2022.
    • goal achieved 20221227 - 200 stars for the whole repo!
  • 10 stars collected so far
• 2018
  • Seventh Problem Set Tackled (March 2023 - )
  • Old languages for this set: Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, Go, Rust, Julia
  • New languages for this set: Java and Kotlin (“The Javas” Part 1)
  • New current way of going through the old problems: do them all from 1, then 2, etc instead of trying to finish each year first.
  • 2 stars collected so far
• 2020
  • First Year of Participation (1st attempt: Live Dec 2020; Trying to get all 50 stars: Sept 2021 -)
  • Solved with Python only during AoC
  • 36 Stars Collected So Far
• 2021
  • Fourth Problem Set/Second Year Participating Live
  • Primarily solved with Python during December 2021
  • 35 stars collected so far
  • Reached 100 stars total over all years on 20211202
  • Interruption in problem-solving days 15-19 due to WorldCon 2021 and 21-25 for family time at Christmas
  • Repo stats at end of 2021 Live period the repo code was split as follows:
    • 67.9% Python
    • 14.4% Ruby
    • 13.7% Perl
    • 2.5% Go
    • 1.4% Haskell
    • 0.1% Shell
• 2022
  • Fifth Problem Set Tackled/Third Year Participating Live
  • Will primarily solve with Python during December 2022
  • 36 Stars Collected so far
  • A few days where I didn't get as much time to work on it as I wanted, but very happy with my progress this year. I finished Day 25 with 36 stars. This is in line with my averages - 35 stars in 2021 and 36 in 2020. (Although I may have solved 1-2 stars for each of those after the year in which the AoC took place)
  • Repo stats: at the end of the 2022 Live period the repo code was split as follows:
    • 73.1% Python
    • 11.7% Ruby
    • 10.9% Perl
    • 3.2% Go
    • 1.1% Haskell
• 2023
  • Eighth Problem Set Tackled/Fourth Year Participating Live
  • Python as primary language; probably Go as secondary and other languages if there's time.
  • 16 stars collected so far
  • Repo Stats: at the end of the 2023 Live period
    • 73.8% Python
    • 11.0% Ruby
    • 10.2% Perl
    • 3.9% Go
    • 1.1% Haskell

Total Stars Over All Years: 218

After I'm all caught up, I may try my hand at some visualizations.

Lessons learned from all my years of doing this

A distillation of what I learned each year. (which is itself a distillation of what I learned daily)

• Learn algorithms for Conway’s Game of Life
• Learn Recursion and Memoization (Caching)
• Often (maybe always, but not in my limited experience) the answer comes down to: map, filter, reduce
• Use Unit Tests to keep from going mad
• For performance reasons you usually want to use a map/hash/dict rather than a list/array/vector/slice
• Solving programming puzzles is addictive
• From doing the problems in more than one language:
  • While you can more or less ape general programming across any language, learning how to take advantage of each language’s quirks, build-in libraries, and paradigms is a lot of fun and can show how some are better at certain problems than others
  • I prefer languages without semicolons to languages with semicolons