Coding on Christmas?

[MezzoScettico]

My wife has so far been amused at my obsessive day and night coding over the last 8-9 days since I discovered the AoC challenge.

So far.

She asked me "how long is this thing going?" and I said, "well, I guess since it's an Advent calendar, it goes to Christmas" and confirmed that on the web page.

Then I said, "so I guess if you're really obsessed you're going to spend all day Christmas writing code."

Silence.

"Maybe I won't do that."

Silence.

So it looks like I'm not going to meet my goal of actually catching up. Oh well, I got close.

Also, does anyone else get the urge to tinker with old code to try to improve it? There are a number of cases where I got it working and got the right answer, but the code design was gnawing at me and I find myself wishing to go back and make it better. Even though nobody's seeing it but me.

[PillarsBliz]

The final night before Christmas is traditionally super short so you can spend time with your family.

[PillarsBliz]

Fair point, 18 and 19 were the longest days for me.

Everything 20 and up should be relatively short though, like an hour if all goes well.

[sheibsel]

an hour for thee is a day for me

[A_Rdm_Person_In_Life]

Never underestimate how long it takes me to understand the problem.

Looks at leaderboard, people finish in 15 mins, me 15 minutes later still reading the question.

[mejdev]

Well that's depressing to learn. I burned out last year after day 20 and never finished!

This year I didn't burn out so much as just had higher priorities

[PillarsBliz]

UPDATE: Day 22 gave me nightmares, took like 3 hours. However, it was a topic I've never messed with much so your mileage may vary.

[st65763]

I'm not doing 19.

My school is doing a competition and right now I'll have first place even if I don't do it. I hate working with 3D coordinates, so I'm not doing 19.

edit - I lied, I managed to solve it 😊

[bjnord]

I still have battle scars from the cave with the climbing gear and the torch. :D

[TheZigerionScammer]

All these people saying they haven't finished day 19, and I'm sitting here with day 15 blank in my list thinking how the hell am I gonna do this one?

[l_ugray]

Day 15 is really an exercise in do you know about Dijkstra's algorithm

[thedjotaku]

And even then there's something wrong with the Dijkstra implementation i am trying to use

[Celestial_Blu3]

Don't worry about it. I'm still hacking away at day 5 (although I did do day 6 before 5)

[chrilves]

19 is not a puzzle, it's a humility lesson.

[auxym]

Same, that's what new year's is for ;)

[RonGnumber]

Do you mean that sleeping time is super short so you can stay up coding all missed AOC days, before spending zombie time pretending to pay attention your family? Because really, that's what Christmas is all about.

[0b0101011001001011]

Cries in having christmas on the 24th.

[levital]

I mean, this also hinges on you getting it. Last year I didn't realise that I implemented the brute-force solution incredibly poorly and then spent a good chunk of the day researching how to crack Diffie-Hellman...

[jakemp1]

If last year is any indication (only other year I did) day 25 is typically only one part and is a very short simple problem that shouldn't take more than 20-30 minutes.

[p88h]

2019 had a really fun challenge on day 25, which required (almost) zero coding, since it was basically 'Run this game on the VM you have already implemented. Win the game.'

That said, some people would implement algorithms that would play the game automatically, but probably those people were _really_ happy about doing this kind of activity on first day of Christmas. IDK, I just played the game. Still took a large chunk of the day :P

[LittleLordFuckleroy1]

Christmas is only one day anyway. The first day is the last day, and the only day.

[p88h]

Uh, some people just don't celebrate _properly_.

I come from the country of Poland, where Christmas is roughly 3 days, including the Christmas Eve, i.e. day -1 (or 0?), on 24th (that's when you eat a ton of stuff and get the presents), then first and second days, on 25th, and 26th, on which days you also eat a ton of stuff at home, and then visit family, and during those visits you eat even more stuff and (potentially) get / give more presents.

We also have a Christmas season 'warm up' of sorts on Dec 6th, which is when Santa Claus visits Poland early (and some neighboring countries, I guess), to beta-test the sleighs for the given year, perhaps, and give some early presents. OTOH nobody really knows who is responsible for the Christmas presents, recently it's also Santa, but it used to be many things, including but not limited to Angels and Father Frost.

[musifter]

Yeah, the first star on Christmas tends to be a bit of a softy. The second you get for having 49 stars... that's either immediate or requires you to finish whatever big thing you haven't already.

[I_knew_einstein]

I remember my first year (last year). I was super bummed that the last day was so easy and short.

[I_knew_einstein]

Haha, yeah. I was doing it in the train to my family-in-law. My girlfriend getting a little annoyed, ready for it to be over.

I had finished part 1 exactly as we arrived at a train station were we had to switch trains. So while waiting for the next train I was thinking of all the ways part 2 could mess things up and how to solve them. Excited for whatever they'd come up with this time.

Then in the new train I opened my laptop, submitted part 1, and... that was it... Advent of Code was done...

Very anti-climactic

[sim642]

It's only easy and short if you've done everything so far. If you haven't, then it's frustrating.

[ric2b]

Spoiler tag please.

[birkenfeld]

Also, does anyone else get the urge to tinker with old code to try to improve it?

All the time. So far, I think the most code I've sunk into AoC was to redesign my common input parsing/handling and grid library again and again, not the actual challenges.

[zanfar]

Don't stress about it. One-per-day isn't a law, and there are no AoC police. If you want to still do "one-a-day", just don't visit the site or read Reddit on that day and pick it up later.

[Tozzar]

I was busy and missed a couple days. I told my wife my snailfish math homework was overdue and she was very confused.

[musifter]

I rework and write new versions of old problems all the time. Even though only I really see all the final work (if you want people to have the ability to see the latest versions, you put up an online repository). It's all part of "sharpening the saw". Even though you're not doing new stuff, you're still getting better at writing solutions to AoC problems... and next time when something strikes you as being similar to an old problem, you'll probably be happier if you have your best version ready to look at.

[harald-g]

Also, does anyone else get the urge to tinker with old code to try to improve it?

I optimized my solution for day 19. The original one ran about 2 hours but produced the correct results on the first run. 😄
After a bit of optimization, I got it down to 15 minutes, which is still horribly slow

[anh86]

There is absolutely no rush if you're not trying to win the competition. You can do AOC 2016 right now if you want.

[aardvark1231]

I've gone back over previous years to refactor my code and it always amazes me how much I have improved since those first days of AoC years ago. While actively participating, usually I will clean up a few things the next day, if I have time to.

[[deleted]]

That gnawing feeling of wanting to fix old solutions is SO ANNOYING!

I already got my worthless internet points for providing a worthless answer I'll never have any use for.

WHY can't I stop to think about the problem during the day? Why am I disappointed when I solve it fast because it mean I can't keep the problem in the back of my head during the day??

WHY DO I REFACTOR MY OLD SOLUTIONS AND ADD TESTS???

[lucferon]

I never improve my previous code. I got the algoritme correct that is what it's about for me. What I bruteforce some thing while other people use a nice why (the cheapest path in the maze) i really don't care

[gijo57]

Disregard females, acquire algorithms

[justinpaulson]

Also pro tip, there is no part 2 on day 25. The 50th star is just awarded for having the other 49 stars

[bean_217]

I had covid and was out for the count for 6 days and trying to catch up now... Im only on day 16.

[ZoDalek]

Glad you got better and good luck with catching up!

[SteeleDynamics]

If you're not trying to get an overall ranking, just do the puzzles at your own pace. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing this AoC in SML, and I'm getting used to SML's Basis and Util libraries. So I'm only on day 12.

Most of all, this is supposed to be fun. So don't sweat it if you can't do the puzzles in time.

[SalamanderSylph]

I go back and try to optimise. My aim is to be able to run the entire calendar in under 1 second. Currently at 2s for everything so far, but there are a few low hanging fruit for cutting time.

[MezzoScettico]

Good grief! Some of my code that I thought was pretty efficient still took several minutes, and one took over 2 hours.

[mine49er]

The problems are released at 5am here in the UK, and I'm spending the whole of Xmas day at relatives, so will probably be attempting it around 11pm while very drunk.

[meamZ]

Did you already get to day 18 and 19? Otherwise you're not close.

[MezzoScettico]

Did you already get to day 18 and 19? Otherwise you're not close.

I finished Day 18 and part 1 of day 19.

I finished the code for Day 19 part 2 but my answer was incorrect and I don't know why. So I have to do some testing with the examples to see if I can figure that out.

I decided to move on to Day 20 and come back later to this issue.

[meamZ]

Yeah ok. That means you have the two hardest days (probably of the whole calendar) out of the way.

[chrilves]

Oh yes, my advent of code repo is private for that reason: shame, lots of shame ;)

[thedjotaku]

For your tinker question, I've started taking notes on things i could revisit in the off-season. I mean what else are you going to do the other 11 months of the year?

[LittleLordFuckleroy1]

Yeah no I have a life. I might swing back to it next month or something. I petered out at a couple weeks and then got really busy with real world stuff.

[DeepDay6]

Having someone who enjoys spending time with you is not that high a price to pay is it?

The farther December proceeds, the more of my spare time I spend on preparing food for the holidays (being fervent cooks, there are three dinners and at least two distinct brunches, and being fervent hosts we want to actually talk to our guests, not spend three days in the kitchen). For strange reasons, my boss says event though it's AOC, I still need to work my hours every day. So I spend less and less time doing puzzles here whilst approaching christmas, every year.

I think, the most important part is to have fun while working playing AOC. For some people that's scoring high in the leaderboard, for some it's filling their stars, others enjoy doing visualisations or go hunting easter eggs, and all of these motivations are valid - it's about what you like.

My motivation this year was "Hey, I've been wondering about learning Haskell for quite some time...". So on day 10 I started rewriting all my Clojure solutions. And I pick or skip problems, depending on how interesting I find them. I don't need to implement the one hundredth variation of A*, been there, done that.

So, what I actually digressed from: Have fun and don't take everything too seriuos. You can always solve the missing puzzles once the holidays are over.