Advent of code reddit

Something is wrong with global snow production, and you've been selected to take a look.

Advent of Code is an excellent annual collection of programming puzzles. It's quickly become my favorite part of the holiday season as a celebration of programming: carefully crafted puzzles, amazing solutions spanning astonishing technical stacks, beautiful visualizations — with a sense of humor and joy around it all. The reason I recommend AoC strongly is because it's simply so much fun : there's a surreal and light-hearted Santa-themed story wound around each year's story, an amazing — and inspiring — community on Reddit ; and the puzzles are generally aimed towards teaching something new. I'd strongly recommend it even if you don't generally enjoy programming competitions like Code Jam or Hacker Cup. Very briefly: a new puzzle unlocks every night at midnight, Eastern time from 1st to 25th December. Each puzzle has 2 parts, with the 2nd part generally being a more complex variation on the theme. Inputs vary and can be large; occasionally involve ASCII art or other sentences that need to be parsed.

Advent of code reddit

.

Axel Lind 's rust solutions: I found these really useful to be able to see significantly more idiomatic Rust than what I'd been writing.

.

You may have recently heard some talk about Advent of Code - every developer's favourite advent calendar. In this article, I'm going to try and explain why everyone can get something out of it. Advent of Code is a website that sets daily challenges for each day of advent. The context for each challenge tells part of a story that spans the full 25 days. Each day, you are presented with two problems that are designed to be challenging whilst remaining accessible to those without much programming experience. Solving a problem rewards a gold star - to complete the challenge, you need to collect all 50 of them.

Advent of code reddit

You're already almost 1. What you can see, however, is a giant squid that has attached itself to the outside of your submarine. Maybe it wants to play bingo? Bingo is played on a set of boards each consisting of a 5x5 grid of numbers. Numbers are chosen at random, and the chosen number is marked on all boards on which it appears. Numbers may not appear on all boards. If all numbers in any row or any column of a board are marked, that board wins. Diagonals don't count. The submarine has a bingo subsystem to help passengers currently, you and the giant squid pass the time.

Houses for sale in seaham county durham

Sophiebits 's solutions: Sophie is constantly on the leaderboard, and I'm generally floored by the terseness of her solutions. I enjoyed this problem a lot, and was feeling particularly proud. There are also a tremendous number of people live-streaming or recording videos as they go: including Uncle Bob , Joel Grus , and several Twitch streamers — I've skimmed a few videos, but I normally don't have the patience to watch so I don't have strong recommendations. Solutions, on the other hand, tend to be single numbers or strings that can pasted in: there's no submission of code required, so you can solve problems however you want. Eric Wastl clearly crafts the problems with a lot of thought and care: which is evident in how clearly the problems are defined, with useful edge cases, and each round is beta tested be we get our grubby hands on it. This is generally my favorite part of the contest — I can see how other programmers approach exactly the same problem, and learn from them. Each puzzle grants one star. The UI was a little surprising, but extremely intuitive once I understood what was happening; using it with a tiled window manager takes a little bit more effort because it isn't initially obvious that you're supposed to move the window onto the part of the screen that you're recording. As I said earlier, there are some excellent programmers working through Advent of Code — occasionally focusing on readable code instead of aiming at the leader board, and it's a pleasure to look at their solutions. As an alternative to be able to actually look at how I perform under time constraints, I set up a few simple scripts to take a screenshot every few seconds and then stitched them together into a sped up video instead. One part of Advent of Code that I dislike is having to manually save the input files, and then pass them into my solution program somehow. This one was embarrassing to find out: I couldn't believe I'd been doing println!

The wind has changed direction enough to stop sending lava droplets toward you, so you and the elephants exit the cave.

I'd strongly recommend donating if you can afford to — just to have a higher chance that AoC sticks around forever until the heat death of the universe — or thereabouts. Submissions are rate limited to at most 1 per minute: otherwise one lateral solution to problems would be to simply brute force the server with multiple possible solutions. Participating there to learn and have fun is a pretty good use of your time. I came across this while looking through Axel Lind's solutions: primitive integers have an astonishing collection of useful functions baked in. Finally, this year was a deep dive back into Rust that went fairly well — I also used this as an opportunity to try out different Rust editors: including VSCode, IntelliJ, and unsurprisingly finding my way back to Emacs — albeit with a much more pleasant configuration than the one I started with. Somewhat less useful — but more cool — is the ability to submit solutions through the CLI; it can read from stdin and write to stdout. The reason I recommend AoC strongly is because it's simply so much fun : there's a surreal and light-hearted Santa-themed story wound around each year's story, an amazing — and inspiring — community on Reddit ; and the puzzles are generally aimed towards teaching something new. I rolled my own function to get a modular inverse and then successively reduced the equations by combining 2 constraints into 1 repeatedly till I got a single modular congruence, which I solved to get the least positive integer that worked.. The 2-part format also encourages trading off good design and quickly hammering out something; a well thought through first answer often means a faster second answer — but it effectively trades off your rank in the first problem with your rank in the second. The rest of us gaze in awe at their short and sweet solutions. Consequently, the Elves are having trouble reading the values on the document. Peter Norvig's Pytudes : A single, elegantly structured notebook that solves all the problems in one go. Figure 2: My blinking Day 20 solution. A little bit of tweaking allowed me to get the same functionality in Emacs with support for everything else I'm already comfortable with thanks to lsp-mode , lsp-rust-analyzer-server-display-inlay-hints and lsp-rust-analyzer-display-parameter-hints : I'll share my Rust based configuration separately. This is particularly valuable when exploring solutions from excellent programmers like Peter Norvig.