[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.