Advent of Code

It is this time of the year, where you usually have some time to spare, which is either filled with family activities or personal projects. When you are into programming you might have heard of the fantastic Advent of Code which is an Advent calendar contain a bunch of small tasks to solve programmatically. Some of them even contain mathematical problems, which, when solved, speed up your program tremendously. It is similar to Project Euler, but presents new riddles every year, which are wrapped in a small Christmas story, and you can even compete with friends or colleagues on private leaderboards.

This year, I use advent of code as an excuse to dive deeper into Rust, after years of using Python and even code-golfing my solutions, and being bored with it. I was invited to a nice group of people at my university, who ran a private leaderboard and set up a benchmarking repository for their solutions. This gave me the necessary boost to give it a try for another year and start over. And it was (is) a good year. I'm not finished with all days yet, but it is a welcoming diversion from the everyday coding during work! If this year's solutions are finished, I might put them online 👍