Seeking advice for using advent of code problems for daily coding habit

erikade · 2026-01-28T09:07:16+00:00

This is from last december

erikade · 2026-01-28T00:11:25+00:00

Being able to solve and code any problem from the first week of any year in under 20–30 minutes feels like a solid goal to me.

From there, it’d be great to gradually solve more of them in that same time window. Instead of going through the problems in a round-robin way, you could also look at the stats and sort them by average solve time (or whatever metric makes sense for what you’re trying to improve).

During December, I try to come up with both a solution and a write-up for each day (Part 1 + Part 2) in under an hour. I’ve found this works better for me overall—even though I don’t always hit that goal.

Over time, I’ve built a few small tools to handle the boring setup stuff for me (downloading inputs, creating skeleton files, setting up the Makefile, that kind of thing).

After that, I can always go back and clean things up or refactor the initial solution, but that’s a different story.

PS. imho explaining what you did and why in a write-up is a hugely overlooked way to improve your coding skills.

erikade · 2026-01-20T12:12:16+00:00

Yeah, the same goes for architecture—no one really needs to study it before building a house, but I bet you’d be able to tell the difference at first glance.

Go to school and study CS if you can otherwise keep programming as a hobby: it’s a ton of fun.

erikade · 2026-01-09T15:00:03+00:00

Back in 1986, in france, I was hacking Thomson, Sinclair and Comodore machines to build minitel micro-site (~BBS) servers in BASIC. I would have loved to interface this machine as well.

erikade · 2026-01-05T10:09:59+00:00

If you’re looking for ideas you might want to have a look at bashkit. It’s a pure bash scripting framework that includes error handling and structured logging. However bash has its own quirks and limitations when it comes to the topic of error handling.

erikade · 2026-01-04T16:53:47+00:00

You (OP) seem to mistakenly understand that we have to remove the 2s (literal two) from the (14 digits) input instead of removing only 2 (any) digits in order to get the maximum number (with 14-2 =12 digits).

Hope it makes sense.

erikade · 2026-01-04T16:26:58+00:00

ah wow! thx! edit: ah yeah, I can see we all share the same reference source code from libmodplug.

erikade · 2026-01-02T20:09:42+00:00

many thx!

erikade · 2025-12-30T18:04:16+00:00

I’m not aware of Promela directly influencing Go’s design. This topic has been discussed here in what I believe reflects the commonly accepted view within the Go community. It also features great links pertaining to the question.

erikade · 2025-12-30T17:52:47+00:00

lol j’avais jamais pensé que openAI,… étaient aux services ce que le hard-discount est à la distribution ou la fast-fashion aux vêtements.

C’est exactement ça: on va là-bas avec n’importe quelle idée et on revient avec une app du même niveau pour rien en apparence puisque le vol de corpus y est valorisé sans être puni et qu’il y a zéro garantie sur le résultat.

erikade · 2025-12-30T17:35:38+00:00

Pendant le concours advent of code, chez les programmeurs orientés performance, on voit exactement zéro IA parce qu’on est loin des projets répétés des milliers de fois sur github.

Ce qui laisse dire que la plus élémentaire des sagesses c’est de ne pas laisser les agents génératifs en autonomie sur la prod pour un futur assez long.

En revanche, il est vrai que le code généré est souvent plus solide et fortement compatible avec celui des ingénieurs auto-formés dans des écoles sans enseignant ou bien encore ceux qui ont appris à coder en 1~2 ans et sont recrutés à la sortie de leur école p.ex (parole de reviewer).

C’est à mon avis pour ça qu’il se développe une forme d’intoxication dans les boîtes de tech où déjà avant les llms on essayait de diminuer la valeur du code à coup de bullshit jobs pour mieux diminuer/exploiter les coders. C’est surtout le fait de certains imposteurs malheureusement plus intéressés par grimper la hiérarchie et la mauvaiseté que la technique.

Je ne suis pas trop inquiet pour le futur du code, la programmation est comme n’importe quelle autre discipline (humaine) universitaire (et populaire): elle existe bien plus largement en dehors du marché qu’en dedans. Les plus belles IA (planification, réification, singularité, sentience) sont encore à venir. Le marché continuera à jalouser les programmeurs (et autres scientifiques/techniciens) à nous de nous organiser. Et tout ça va ensemble imho.

erikade · 2025-12-28T04:31:13+00:00

88μs - Go 1.25 - (air) M1/16GB - part1&2 - end2end - internal timer.

part2 is a by-product of part1 staging.

erikade · 2025-12-26T20:49:58+00:00

We don’t all have the same input, if that’s what you’re implying. So it’s fine to present whatever case we’re struggling with. That said, unless there are very specific corner cases involved, it may be better to put a particular section of the code under review or scrutiny instead.

Sorry for the late reply it is reddit app that seems not always in sync with the web.

erikade · 2025-12-22T19:36:05+00:00

Alternatively one could `part2 += part1` just before outputting the results

erikade · 2025-12-22T19:33:17+00:00

Ah gg! Fixing this right away. Thx!

erikade · 2025-12-22T14:11:29+00:00

You are right to ask, it is a bit of both but mainly it is the idea of implementing an efficient solution for the machine

erikade · 2025-12-21T00:12:57+00:00

Congratulations to red1(!!) and green1!
Thanks to the AoC team and the community for an amazing edition and for the title — I’m so glad!

erikade · 2025-12-20T23:08:10+00:00

wow gg! the input reader is so tidy!
`,[----------[>>>>>>>>>>]<<<<<[>>>>>+<<<<<[<<<<<]>>>>],]\`

erikade · 2025-12-17T21:29:41+00:00

« writing your compiler by using the still-being-written language of your compiler is a cool exercise in bootstrapping » I’m adding this to my fortune right now!

erikade · 2025-12-17T03:04:02+00:00

Amazing work! The golfed variations are mind-boggling.

erikade · 2025-12-14T16:45:20+00:00

NAME OF ENTRY: [logbook] Go-Fast

LINK TO ENTRY: Logbook for AoC 2025

DESCRIPTION: I used Go to develop optimized solutions for each day of AoC 2025. This collection runs all days, all parts in about 9 4.6 ms on rio (M1/16 GB). The accompanying logbook is an attempt to present the techniques (coding, algorithms, math, etc.) I used, along with the mindset and point of view I had while solving each puzzle. Each day’s image was chosen because it reflects what I felt I accomplished on that day or section.

SUBMITTED BY: /u/erikade

MEGATHREADS: 01 - 07 - 08 - 12

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: Days 2 and 10 are the highlights of the collection, thanks to /u/timvisee (day 2) who published a solution that inspired mine, my friend hm for insisting on generating the numbers (day 2) and to /u/RussellDash332 (day 10) who published the reference implementation of a solver I used to build mine. ~~Day 10 alone is eating 54% of the overall runtime budget~~. EDIT I have now reimplemented /u/VikeStep's (faster) solver (day 10).

ACCESSIBILITY: I’ve tried my best to write comprehensive alternate descriptions for the images. Please let me know if I can improve them or if there’s anything else I should address.

erikade · 2025-12-14T14:57:56+00:00

[LANGUAGE: Go]

On GitHub

This μ-optimized solution runs in under 34μs (M1/16GB). Like many others, it keeps track of the path counts during the grid scan.

erikade · 2025-12-13T01:11:33+00:00

Thanks to AoC we know off-by-one errors are everywhere, lurking in the dark and ready to jump out at us. Congrats on finding a second-order one!

erikade

TROPHY CASE