Advent of Code 2017

I discovered the Advent of Code from some retweet on the first days of December. I found them really interesting and original so I decided to give them a try. I know, they’re just programming exercises but they’re written in a nice story driven way!

Being already behind I didn’t pretend that I was gonna ever catch up or try to solve it on the same day. The beginning of December was a busy period, I had to finish a bunch of work before going on holidays and prepare the holidays themselves.

During the next days I could solve up until day 13th. The second part of that day was surprising. I solved the first part by coding a simulation of the process which is the easiest and less performant way of doing it. It’s fine for part 1 but part 2 doesn’t finish the computation in a reasonable amount of time. And the math solution, sadly, would take a bit too much time for my brain to grasp.

The other 2 days I failed (3 and 11) have something in common, it’s about some weird gird pattern. I find the exercise super interesting, quite different of what I’m used to do, so I would like to go back to them some time in the future.

But we’re in the new year already. And with it I have multiple goals that I would like to accomplish and they require time. The Advent of Code was a fun side track to ending the year but now I want to put my energy in more important personal projects.

My solutions are still saved in a safe place and the website won’t disappear, so I could jump on them at any point, specially getting ready for the Advent of Code 2018 :)

And finally, a recommendation for you: the exercises are super interesting, if you’re the kind of programmer that doesn’t usually do this kind of exercise I really recommend you to spend some time doing a couple of them. It’s real fun!