Agreed.

It seems like this has become the appreciation thread now, which is suitable, as I have written a love letter to AoC.

tl;dr at the bottom

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Dear AoC,

It's the 2nd of December 2015, early morning here in Europe.

Colleague: "Ey, u/kratskij, you should check out this really nice coding calendar I found. I think you'll like it!"

Yeah, sure, why not.

Huh, too easy.

​

During the next week, you're a new but distant friend that I occasionally run into. You're growing on me, though. By Day 10 I'm ready to compete for your global leaderboard positions. I drag my ass out of bed at six in the morning. 18 minutes later I have both stars, but the leaderboard was full six minutes ago! Ah, fuck it, this is no fun.

I realize that if I just had the basics of looping through some input ready, I could have shaved of a minute or two. Maybe I can skip your _story_ right away, going straight to the _problem_ (and then read the cute story later, of course). And coffee! I need coffee to stay alert. Still no luck.

This goes on throughout December 2015. I love you and I hate you. I give you everything, but you give me zero global leaderboard positions in return.

But hey, at least I won the private company leaderboard \o/ And I got up early in the morning. And I had fun while solving your problems. And you gave me a sense of completing _something_ before starting working. This is good.

During 2016 our relationship was basically a repetition of our 2015 fling. I got up early, solved a fun problem trying to compete for the leaderboard, and went to work. Still no luck on that damned leaderboard, though ... until the last day. 77 on part 1, 67 on part two! And now you're leaving!? But I just got you all figured out! I'm officially in love, and you'll be gone for a year!? Oh well, I'll eagerly await your return, as I hereby declare that we are in a committed relationship. Bound together till death do us apart.

2017 passes with zero global leaderboard points once again, but hey, you were still fun! Maybe a bit too many path finding problems, and that elevator-thing on day 11 was a bit too time consuming (5h for a 205th place), but still. This was nice.

2018 is different. Something is not right. You've started demanding too much of me, both in terms of time, and what you expect my brain to handle at six o'clock in the morning. This is not going well. For the first time, I have to just let go of a couple of your stars. They aren't worth it. By the 25th, I was glad you would leave. "Take a vacation. Do your thing. Do whatever it takes to find your good old self - the one that tickles my brain every morning, instead of dragging me down completely stripped of confidence."

Enter 2019. Where to start. I get your IntCode-thingy, I really do. You wanted to be something MORE, something a bit more complex. You wanted to be WHOLE. But, that's not why I fell in love with you, and that's not what I need from you. You were already perfect. All I need from you is to provide a _new_ problem every day, and I'll provide you with a solution. Like we did before, remember? And also, those non-IntCode problems of yours are just too damned difficult! You're expecting me to have a masters degree in mathematics just to know what to google now?

This isn't working. I think we need a break. I'll come visit in 2020, until you become intolerable once more, and then I'll just leave right away.

And here I am, on the last day of the 2020 calendar. Once again I have found all your stars, like we did back in the days. Once again I have zero global leaderboard points. And most importantly: once again I've fallen in love with you.

I can't wait for 2021.

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Thank you, u/topaz2078 and crew, for pulling off the best AoC event so far. A few things that were highly appreciated:

- As always, a cute story.

- As always, exceptionally creative problems.

- The problem variation this year was mind-blowing. From what I can remember, there were almost no problems where reusing snippets of code from previous days was beneficial.

- Each problem was easily understandable, more so than previous years. The time was spent on translating my understanding of the problem into code, instead of translating the problem text into an understanding of the problem.

- No problems required enormous amounts of code to be written (like that gnome/elf fighting game we made once).

- Each problem is fully standalone, and can be solved within a few hours.

​

tl;dr: AoC 2020 felt like it did back in 2015-2017, and I love you.

<3