[la_fayette]

Last year I participated in the advent of code challenges. I remember a puzzle from day 16 [1], which took an afternoon or more .

The idea is really great, however it seems quite hard to solve interesting problems in this short timeframe.

[1]: https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/16

[shadowofneptune]

It's amazing how rich some of the puzzles are in Advent of Code. Sometimes the question is about tabular data and so is naturally suited to Excel, other times a stack-based language fits better. There's countless answers posted online to each one, each equally valid but with different tradeoffs. Great outlet for this small-project programming.

If anyone likes solving puzzles like these, I'd recommend the Zachtronics games. TIS-100 in particular was my introduction to parallelism (https://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/).

[hinkley]

If you did get good at this, all you’ve done is trained yourself to trust your own code over libraries. My suspicion is that experiences like this are the supervillain origin story for people with NIH syndrome.

[ahaferburg]

It sounds like you're not familiar with Advent of Code. Nothing prevents you from using libraries to solve any of these puzzles. You can solve them any way you like.