Advent of Code: I finished on the leaderboard!

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After 25 days of participation in Advent of Code 2023, I finished on the global top 100 leaderboard as #78! 🎉🥳

Reflection

The first around 10 days were relatively easy. These questions don’t require very much algorithmic thinking, and therefore, more people participated and my rankings were not very high, with the exception of a few days.

Then the questions got progressively harder, and I have to admit, many of the later ones I couldn’t find a solution immediately. Some of them I haven’t even solved now, but I think I can if I spent a little more time on them.

The competitive environment was fun but frustrating at times; I hate how I can’t solve a problem but the leaderboard just keeps filling up! Also when I solve a problem and I ranked #113 on the leaderboard (which granted no points): …

Also, coding on an iPad is a nightmare! I had to do that the days I was at school (which was most of the time). There isn’t even a good text editor natively on iPad, let alone an IDE! I did most of the programming on VS Code Server, but there were issues (for example, copy & pasting the test input would crash my browser).

Anyway, here are my personal times (as of the time of publishing this article):

      --------Part 1--------   --------Part 2--------
Day       Time   Rank  Score       Time   Rank  Score
 24   00:10:50     24     77          -      -      -
 23   00:06:56     35     66          -      -      -
 21   00:05:39    194      0          -      -      -
 20   00:13:37      6     95          -      -      -
 19   00:10:18     97      4          -      -      -
 18   00:09:51    167      0          -      -      -
 17       >24h  19473      0       >24h  19470      0
 16   00:07:48     17     84   00:17:56    193      0
 15   00:01:39     26     75   00:08:23     33     68
 14   00:04:30    133      0       >24h  24569      0
 13       >24h  32361      0       >24h  28072      0
 12       >24h  35710      0       >24h  22765      0
 11   00:07:59    240      0   00:11:20    202      0
 10   00:10:30     72     29   00:43:04    180      0
  9   00:03:02     40     61   00:03:48     24     77
  8   00:03:33    113      0   00:11:01    127      0
  7   00:08:07     32     69   00:14:09     62     39
  6   00:04:37    395      0   00:08:32    725      0
  5   00:12:24    393      0   00:32:01    196      0
  4   00:06:45   1473      0   00:10:22    403      0
  3   01:10:14   7932      0   01:20:42   6027      0
  2   00:04:20    113      0   00:05:43     64     37
  1   00:05:26   2379      0   00:10:49    442      0

And my code is stored on this GitHub repo: https://github.com/david-why/aoc-2023, please feel free to take a look.

For the questions I didn’t do yet, I might fill them in over the past few days, so stay tuned 😀

Alright, that’s all for today – David out!

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