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by smcl 562 days ago
I'm in CET so time-wise it can be ok - problems open at 6am meaning if I get up I have about an hour around before I need to walk my walk my dog and get ready for work. But switching on at that time is really hard, the amount of stupid off-by-one errors, or referring to since-renamed-but-still-present functions in my Jupyter Notebook is not even funny.

But I luckily managed to avoid the "reusable AoC library" problem around 2019 when a week beforehand I wrote down the sort of functions I wanted to have at my disposal (usually things around representing 2D/3D grids of unknown size and pathfinding/debugging therein, but a few other bits and pieces) and made a simple library that I will sometimes add things to after I'm done with the problem for the day.

I was tempted to some functions (similar to those your CLI harness provided) for retrieving test data and submitting answers but I managed to stop myself short of that! But I am sure you're far from the only one to end up down that road.
2 comments
Kwpolska 562 days ago
I'm in CET too, and 6:00 is not an hour where I’m awake, and if I were, my brain functions would definitely not be at a level where I would be capable of coding.

Midnight would be much more acceptable.

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smcl 561 days ago
I think you'd be surprised - you'll definitely be capable of coding at that hour. But like me you'd just also be quite capable of making daft mistakes :D
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beacon294 562 days ago
What if you don't get up?
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smcl 561 days ago
If it's a work day and I don't wake up on time, I'll pick away at it over the course of the day - usually I'll get a chance to think about it on my tram ride to work and complete it at lunchtime

If it's a weekend I'll just do it at my leisure at some point during the day when I have some time - maybe head to a nice cafe or something.

I'm nowhere near the top 100 - closest has been iirc top 200 a few years back - so it's not like I need to start at 6am.

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beacon294 555 days ago
I have trouble fitting this kind of thing in consistently. It's hard with work, chores, family, and then motivation to code after coding at work.
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