Advent of Code

I ain’t no programmer, but one of my aims is to learn the Rust Programming Language. I’ve read “The Book” (apparently the TitleCase matters) a few times, understanding about half of it, and tried to write somethings in the language for the hell of it.

However, seeing as most of my work involves python (or R when I really can’t avoid it), I haven’t really developed any skill in the language. I don’t have much call to use it directly at work (although a lot of my python work uses rust-written tools) and so I don’t really get the reps in. So essentially it’s like I’ve been doing duolingo in a language I never speak; I know some vocab but the grammar and idioms are beyond me.

Thus enter Advent of Code. If you don’t know it, it’s great. It’s a collection of puzzles, released in December of each year, that allow you to practice various things, like file I/O, error handling, iteration, etc.

My aim here is to treat this as something of a dev-log/learning-log where I document my thinking and what I’ve learned about in each puzzle.

I’m putting it up online because I’m hoping that (even though the internet ain’t what it used to be) committing to publishing my thoughts on it will help me consolidate my learning, and might help someone else foolish enough to try this.

I’m going to do the 2015 puzzles for sure, and then we’ll see after that.

So if you want to join me, you can (and should) log into AOC get your own test input, and then come back and see how badly I did compared to you.