Gotta Catch 'Em All: My AoC Challenge

I’ve known about Advent of Code (AoC) for quite a while now but, to be honest, I’ve never been fond of programming challenges. I remember back at university when there were teams participating in ICPC—I glossed over some of the problems and even took some of those as inspiration for making exams for my students back when I was a tutor, but I never found the motivation to tackle them in my spare time.

After more than 10 years of doing software development for a living, I want to rekindle my passion for programming and problem-solving in general. With the rise of agent-aided programming and the proliferation of widely available LLM models, I’ve been feeling that it’s really easy to rely too heavily on these tools for everything. Don’t get me wrong—I think they can be quite useful, but I also believe there’s beauty in manually programming something from scratch, even on paper, so I mourn the loss of this kind of interaction with computers.

This is where AoC comes into play. A few weeks ago, I was looking for programming challenges and found these to be quite popular. I’ve been learning Go for a bit now and thought this was the perfect bite-sized type of problem to write in a language I hope to become fluent in.

So I’ve set a goal for myself: Not only will I complete the Advent of Code problems, but I’m on the hunt for all the stars, meaning I’ll have to solve all 25 problems from every year and complete both parts of each one, for a grand total of 500 stars (reached for 800-ish people worldwide as of December 2024).

That’s it. I’ll be posting my results starting with my setup and making a post for each year of AoC, highlighting challenges and my experience learning Go tricks through them.

Gotta catch ’em all.