Advent of Code 2021

I love adventofcode. I have a rule I follow now which makes it a lot more enjoyable: if I can't make headway on a problem after trying for a day or so, I'll use the subreddit to find a hint, and then usually that's enough to help me to the answer. Very occasionally I just completely cheat (often the pure math based questions). I don't like missing out on the stars.... I mean it's the only way you get to…

Found it in 2016 and have done it ever since (and in the early days of December 2016 I went back and did the 2015 puzzles I'd missed). I was one of the 271 people who had all 200 stars (i.e. completed all puzzles) when Eric tweeted out that stat. Usually takes anything from 5 minutes to an hour do most puzzles, quickly hacked together in perl. Very occasionally there's one that takes longer than that. Sometimes I redo them…

Love this. I did the first couple of days within irb (Ruby REPL) before deciding to actually write scripts, seeing the second exercise for a given day builds on the first. Found it interesting there's a "Leader board" since well, there's no "points" to accumulate other than completing two puzzles per day, so whomever is listed there is just those 100 who came to see the puzzles first. So far they're not very hard, but still fun.

This might be a contentious take but I have concluded that people that work in tech need to adjust to the idea that "coding" as a sole technical proficiency will become increasingly less valuable as time goes on, and other technical skills that don't necessarily involve "coding" (such as OS knowledge, networking, etc.) will become more valuable. In other words I feel really bad for bootcamp people right now.