[makeitdouble]

> felt too much like my day job

Agree.

I think it helps to do it in a language you're not familiar with, or with some artificial limitation on how to solve it (no third party libraries for instance).

It takes more time, but felt less like a grind for me.

[seba_dos1]

Last year I have used Python without using any imports and, whenever I felt like it, tried to golf it as much as I could. Turned out easier than I expected, even without any libraries Python is pretty powerful for this kind of tasks: https://gitlab.com/dos1/AoC21

There were only like two or three days that felt frustrating, but mostly because of the problem being poorly specified.