[thom]

I just find the idea that anybody would judge you on the scores absolutely crazy. Have you looked at people's code?! Do I want to hire people who can create unreadable one liners, then rewrite them into another unreadable one liner for the second part of each puzzle? Do I want to make it impossible to hire people with jobs, kids, or people in different timezones? Would you want to work somewhere that used this sort of thing to decide how to build teams?

Advent of Code for me has always been about creativity, learning new languages, some fun with co-workers. Occasionally after finding the simplest solution, I'll try and work out algorithms with better performance, or even read papers on the underlying fundamental computer science problem involved. But I try to write the code as I would in the day job, and so I always use the example inputs to write unit tests and I always try to refactor stuff to be readable. I'd much rather see code I could imagine working with in real life on someone's GitHub profile than something absurdly terse.

All that said, the puzzles this year have been pretty simple and do seem slightly more optimised to people on speedruns than some years previously, so it's not been that stimulating so far.