Saturday, December 18, 2021
If you're looking at the per-day leaderboard (an activity I don't recommend spending too much time on, but is fun anyway), it's easy to see the puzzles are heating up! The longest first time to both stars before this was Day 16 at 9:52. Today, it nearly doubled to 17:13! What's going on?
Friday, December 17, 2021
Oh good, this series has made it to Day 7, the day that I wasn't sure my code was "right", but did give the correct answer.
Friday, December 17, 2021
Calling it "Advent of Code" sort of presupposes that there should be code involved. Without starting a flamewar about what is and isn't code, I want to say: sometimes you really don't need code to answer the puzzle.
Thursday, December 16, 2021
The storm I was worried about mainly went south of me. The local airport weather records say our winds topped out at a brief 35mph sustained, and one 40mph gust. Starlink kept right on shuttling bits the whole time, so I was able to check out Advent of Code 2021, Day 16 right away.
Thursday, December 16, 2021
It's fun revisiting the earlier puzzles to write about them after having done the later puzzles. Similarities show up that I hadn't considered at the time. For example, Day 6, which has the same sort of modeling-space growth problem as Day 14.
Thursday, December 16, 2021
There's probably a good way to solve Advent of Code 2021, Day 5 without actually rendering the lines, as shown in the puzzle description, but rendering the lines provided such a good debugging aid that I couldn't see bothering with other methods.
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Remember on Day 12, when I said I wasn't particularly well versed in path plotting? Welcome to Advent of Code 2021, Day 15, where that's the name of the game. We have to find the "path of least risk" through a grid of tiles with varying risk levels. This one took me a while.
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Here I've been going on and on about how recent Advent Of Code days have had more complex parsing than earlier days, when I completely forgot about Bingo on Day 4. The timestamp in the git repo says I finished this puzzle at 6pm. I think the fact that I was hungry for dinner shows in the code.
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Okay, Day 14 of Advent of Code 2021 was fun. I had a good time solving it last night, and had a good time again cleaning up that code to share this morning.
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Wasn't I just talking about enjoying Erlang's binary/bit-level pattern matching? Today is full of it!