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by criddell
906 days ago
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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. |
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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.