Last few weeks I have been spending lots of time on this year’s edition of Advent of Code. There are still 7 days to go, but I thought I’d share my thoughts on the process so far.

Advent of Code is a set of coding challenges published between 1st and 25th of December every year. Everyone gets their own exclusive input and what matters is giving the correct answer.

This year I’ve made a effort to write my solutions in Rust. Even though I ignore most of the generic parts of the language, I still get very effective with it. Rust clicked for me in 2022 for good. My coding style is very caveman-ish with strong influences of regular C, but I find it very effective. I post my solutions on my GitHub.

Computer science problems are always on my list of things I would want to be better at. After leaving the university, I never really had an occasion for that. AoC has been a great hack for that. The problems are presented in very nice way. There is no pressure on being the most efficient. Some tasks require a trick to finish in a reasonable time, but there is a lot of room to do different optimizations.

I encourage everyone to give it a try. I haven’t finished all challenges on time, nor I fight to get a good spot on the leaderboard. I still have a lot of fun. It’s like LeetCode, but actually motivating. My brain haven’t got that much focused thinking in a very long time.