[bigell]

I love advent of code, and I look forward to it every year!

I've never stressed out about the leaderboard. Ive always taken it as an opportunity to learn a new language, or brush up on my skills.

In my day-to-day job, I rarely need to bootstrap a project from scratch, implement a depth first search of a graph, or experiment with new language features.

It's for reasons like these that I look forward to this every year. For me it's a great chance to sharpen the tools in my toolbox.

[alexfoo]

Some part of me would love a job that was effectively solving AoC type problems all the time, but then I'd probably burn out pretty quickly if that's all I ever had to do.

Sometimes it's nice to have a break by writing a load of error handling, system architecture documentation, test cases, etc.

> For me it's a great chance to sharpen the tools in my toolbox.

That's a good way of putting it.

My way of taking it a step further and honing my AoC solutions is to make them more efficient whilst ensuring they are still easy to follow, and to make sure they work on as many different inputs as possible (to ensure I'm not solving a specific instance based on my personal input). I keep improving and chipping away at the previous years problems in the 11 months between Decembers.