[will_pseudonym]

I'm in the same boat as you having no formal college/university CS training. You've given me a good idea for a blog series. Writing posts that go through the solutions I came up with for each day of AoC if I can do so without benefit of knowledge of useful algorithms & data structure concepts, and then reading the best solutions I can find on reddit etc, and write a blog post on how it works, as well as what underlying concepts it utilizes, and how they work. If I do that for all days/years of AoC, I could post a summary of the most useful concepts that I learned, that were applied to the most problems of AoC.