Comment by alexfoo
Comment by alexfoo 3 days ago
Got to agree. I'm even surprised at just how little progress many of my friends and ex-colleagues over the years make given that they hold down reasonable developer jobs.
Comment by alexfoo 3 days ago
Got to agree. I'm even surprised at just how little progress many of my friends and ex-colleagues over the years make given that they hold down reasonable developer jobs.
In order to complete AoC you need more than just the ability to write code and solve problems. You need to find abstract problem-solving motivating. A lot of people don't see the point in competing for social capital (internet points) or expending time and energy on problems that won't live on after they've completed them.
I have no evidence to say this, but I'd guess a lot more people give up on AoC because they don't want to put in the time needed than give up because they're not capable of progressing.
Yeah, time is almost certainly the thing that kills most people's progress but that's not the root cause.
I think it comes down to experience, exposure to problems, and the ability to recognise what the problem boils down to.
A colleague who is an all round better coder than me might spend 4 hours bashing away trying to solve a problem that I might be able to look at and quickly recongise it is isomorphic to a specific classic Comp Sci or Maths problem and know exactly how best to attack it, saving me a huge amount of time.
Spoiler alert: Take the "Slam Shuffle" in 2019 Day 22 (https://adventofcode.com/2019/day/22). I was lucky that I quickly recognised that each of the actions could be represented as '( a*n + b ) mod noscards' (with a and b specific to the action) and therefore any two actions like this can be combined into the same form. The optimal solution follows relatively simply from this.
Doing all of the previous years means there's not much new ground although Eric always manages to find something each year.
There have also been some absolutely amazing inventions along the way. The IntCode Breakout game (2019) and the adventure game (can't remember the year) both stick in my mind as amazing constructions.
That's exactly why I don't do more than I do. I do some of the easy ones and it's fun. Then it gets a little harder and I start wondering how much time I want to put into this.
And then something shiny and fun comes along during a problem that I'm having trouble with, and I just never come back.
It's hard for most people to focus on a single thing for a long period of time. Motivation tends to come and go. I started the 2024 solutions in 2025, without the pressure and got to the end this way (not without help though TBH). Secondary motivation can help, like being bored or wanting to learn another programming language.
I've never tried AoC prior but with other complex challenges I've tried without much research, there comes a point where it just makes more sense to start doing something on the backlog at home or a more specific challenge related to what I want to improve on.
Because like 80% of AoC problems require deep Computer science background and deeply specific algorithms almost nobody is using in their day to day work.
My experience has been "little progress" is related to the fact that, while AoC is insanely fun, it always occurs during a time of year when I have the least free time.
Maybe when I was in college (if AoC had existed back then) I could have kept pace, but if part of your life is also running a household, then between wrapping up projects for work, finalizing various commitments I want wrapped up for the year, getting together with family and friends for various celebrations, and finally travel and/or preparing your own house for guests, I'm lucky if I have time to sit down with a cocktail and book the week before Christmas.
Seeing the format changed to 12 days makes me think this might be the first time in years I could seriously consider doing it (to completion).