[nlawalker]

For anyone currently looking for something that does this for you, may I suggest Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com/ This is the first year I've really made time and space to enjoy it, and enjoy it I have.

Also - this article ends on such a weird note given the message that the rest of it delivers. The author has finally realized how valuable it is to have something that gets them going, regardless of whether or not it ends up being "useful", but then immediately stumbles over the fear of it not lasting and failing to achieve greatness in it and sharply concludes with that sentiment.

Perseverance through intermediate-ness into greatness is irrelevant to enjoyment. Sure, be great at your hobby if you're driven to be great, but if you're looking to maximize enjoyment, it's much better to focus on a) embracing intermediateness, and b) exposing yourself to new things so you can find the next hobby that will light you up.

[qsort]

Advent of Code is great but it requires you to:

- (a) be available at precisely midnight EST every day for an entire month. That would be 6am for me, not really feasible on working days for a full month.

- (b) be extremely good at a weird flavor of programming competition -- more often than not you don't win at AoC by writing better solutions, you just have to crank out a solution that you don't too long to type.

I like competitions, I really do, done them my entire life, but AoC is just not that interesting to me.

I'm just doing the problems every day ignoring the leaderboard, 48/50 stars, this year I'm on track to get 50/50 on Christmas day :)

[criddell]

It doesn’t require either of those things. I’ve been doing it this year and I’m on day 17 I think. I probably won’t finish it until the end of January.

I looked at the leaderboard one day there were a lot of people who finished the problem set in 3-4 minutes. I spent more time than that reading the problem description.

It’s still a lot of fun. Some days I’ll solve the problem more than once just to try different ideas.

[nlawalker]

... there's a leaderboard?

Kidding, of course, but that's pretty much how I feel about it. I haven't done any real programming in >5 years so I'm using it to dust off the cobwebs, get up to speed on C# language features and push myself to think about the problems functionally/recursively where I can, for fun. The freewheeling open-endedness is the best part because you can get value/enjoyment/satisfaction out of it a million different ways: you could golf the problems; use them to learn new languages; pretend you're writing production code and make it super clean and organized; do them with a partner or group; etc. etc. There's so much value simply in interesting, well-defined puzzles with a good scope, and the presence of the leaderboard is actually a really good example of not letting the need for greatness (especially by arbitrary measures!) stand in the way of enjoyment.

I'm in the same boat as you, I started late and I'm on day 14 or so with a couple skips that I'll get back to, hope to finish in January, and then maybe go back and clean a few of them up, reflect on them, write a little bit about them, and then start looking at problems from previous years.

[wredue]

Yeah. I started like 13 days late and am just on day 5 part 2 (building it out a few times cause I’ve never worked on interval algos, so trying a few different things out).

You don’t need to compete or even do them on the day they release. It’s been fun solving them regardless.