Advent of Code 2020

The PuPPy slack channel had a group of people doing Advent of Code. I hadn’t done this before, but decided to give it a go.

The programming challenges started out fairly easy, and it was nice to code for an hour or two and get the satisfaction of a little gold star for my effort.

The problems increased in difficulty over time, and some were seriously tricky and completed over a couple of days. I definitely didn’t come close to being a speed “winner,” (the global leaderboard winners solved them in minutes), but I did finish them all with varying levels of beauty and efficiency.

It was a good chance to practice some odd corners of python that I don’t get to use that often and to do some “fun coding” rather than “work coding.” I also tried reimplementing a few of the problems involving tight loops to see how different approaches affect performance in python. Overall, it was a nice payoff for a short-term commitment.

Looking at the other repos from members of my peer slack channel, I think a good new year’s resolution might be to get a handle on type-hinted python. My code seems to be “behind the times” without it.

My repo is here