Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Ah yeah I've been there! Having done it a few years now, I've found that the approach that works for me is: if it starts looking like I'll be stuck on one for more than a few hours, I'll skip it and move on. Otherwise I'll accumulate an insurmountable backlog that becomes more of a depressing chore to think about, than a fun little christmas tradition. I'd rather have a mostly-complete set of problems by the end of the year that I can come back and clean up when I feel like it.

That said, if you'd have a better holiday season by just stepping back from the computer and relaxing then that sounds great too. Either way - enjoy!

View on HN

My main complaint the last time I did this (2022) was the havoc it wreaked on my sleep schedule. Advent of Code is not kind to East Coast participants.

Every year except for one has been kind of the same pattern for me:

Day 1: this year, I'm just going to solve the problems. No futzing around.

Day 3: but it would be kind of neat to turn the solutions into a reusable AoC library. Just something minimal.

Day 5: and I should really add a CLI harness for retrieving the problems and parsing the input files.

Day 6: and testing of course.

Day 7: maybe I'll skip today's problem (just for today) and keep improving the framework.

Day 358: oh neat, Advent of Code is coming up.

I'm in CET so time-wise it can be ok - problems open at 6am meaning if I get up I have about an hour around before I need to walk my walk my dog and get ready for work. But switching on at that time is really hard, the amount of stupid off-by-one errors, or referring to since-renamed-but-still-present functions in my Jupyter Notebook is not even funny.

But I luckily managed to avoid the "reusable AoC library" problem around 2019 when a week beforehand I wrote down the sort of functions I wanted to have at my disposal (usually things around representing 2D/3D grids of unknown size and pathfinding/debugging therein, but a few other bits and pieces) and made a simple library that I will sometimes add things to after I'm done with the problem for the day.

I was tempted to some functions (similar to those your CLI harness provided) for retrieving test data and submitting answers but I managed to stop myself short of that! But I am sure you're far from the only one to end up down that road.

What if you don't get up?

If it's a work day and I don't wake up on time, I'll pick away at it over the course of the day - usually I'll get a chance to think about it on my tram ride to work and complete it at lunchtime

If it's a weekend I'll just do it at my leisure at some point during the day when I have some time - maybe head to a nice cafe or something.

I'm nowhere near the top 100 - closest has been iirc top 200 a few years back - so it's not like I need to start at 6am.

I have trouble fitting this kind of thing in consistently. It's hard with work, chores, family, and then motivation to code after coding at work.

I'm in CET too, and 6:00 is not an hour where I’m awake, and if I were, my brain functions would definitely not be at a level where I would be capable of coding.

Midnight would be much more acceptable.

I think you'd be surprised - you'll definitely be capable of coding at that hour. But like me you'd just also be quite capable of making daft mistakes :D

Stay out of my head!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com