For 4 years I have subjected myself to the mental torture that is Advent of Code. I have only gotten 50 stars for a single year, 2021.
For that year, I made it significantly harder for myself in two ways:
- Every set of challenges had to be completed 24 hours after they were released
- No imports were allowed - not for external libraries, and not for base libraries included with Python.
It was brutal, but from it I learned so much about optimization, shortcuts to get an answer quicker, and just plain patience.
This year is the last year I am able to do this before college. My one and only goal is to truly complete every single challenge, regardless of how long it takes.
For my final year, I plan on including mini-writeups of every challenge, as well as statistics on the following:
- Fastest + slowest completion times
- Shortest + longest solutions
- Easiest + hardest solutions
- Subjectively worst solution