TL;DR: I never stuck with Advent of Code and I think that’s mostly OK.
As a follow up to my eager and excited post about Advent of Code… I was definitely getting ahead of myself haha. I’ve still never completed a full advent of code.
On learning stuff Link to heading
I said the thing I’d set out to learn is “finishing Advent of Code” but I actually learned a lot, even using a language I’m pretty handy with.
I think the biggest benefit to me was working the muscle of whacking together a tested piece of Ruby code that did something somewhat interesting from scratch. It feels like an important skill to work for interview preparedness mainless, but also proof-of-concepts and quick productivity wins. This has been super helpful to me.
I also thought that using |= to uniquely append arrays was really smart but doing that over and over can be really slow so that was nice to learn. I found sets far more performant for the Advent of Code use cases.
I also learned how to use matrices in Ruby! Fun!
On having fun! Link to heading
I really enjoyed it! I’m glad I took a good crack at it this year and I’ll do that again next year.
On knowing when to stop Link to heading
When finding somewhere to sit alone and write code started to feel like a chore, I stopped doing it. At the point where the problems get reasonably challenging, I had already gone to visit my family and friends in Newfoundland, and I just totally stopped wanting to dedicate the time I needed to spend to get the problems done. It was our first Christmas together since the pandy and it was lovely! It was more important to me and I’m pretty OK with that to be honest.
Next year I hope to do better, get farther, be faster, etc. I’ll use Ruby again! And it’ll be a lot of fun again! And if it starts to feel like a chore at any point, I won’t do it and that’s fine.
Neato!