I finished the Advent of Code 2024 yesterday, and I'm over it!

I've previously written about my (very naive) daily strategies (day 1, 2, 3) and a recap at the two week mark for this year's competition.

I found the challenges to be extremely god damn challenging by the end. I forced myself to finish each one, but I wasn't really enjoying it by the halfway mark.

If I had to write code like this for work, I would find a new job

I get that somebody has to write all the parsers and interpreters in the world, but that somebody isn't going to be me. My brain just isn't wired for this specific kind of programming task.

If I'm trying to do something useful to a multi-dimensional array while nested within two or three loops, I'm going to do it wrong. At least that's what my many, many buggy solutions over the past few weeks have taught me.

Getting the correct number from a function isn't fun

It rules that there are people who love to do this kind of thing for fun. Thank goodness we have those people. But this is not fun.

Making things is fun. Fixing a broken thing can be fun, given the right circumstances. Doing what amounts to useless math homework is not fun. Sorry.

There needs to be different scoreboards for AI solvers vs normies

Why are there multiple people routinely solving the puzzle in seconds mixed in with god tier programmers doing it by hand?

This is a minor gripe, but it would be a lot more fun to see how I'm stacking up against people in a similar time bracket vs the cheaterboard and the poor souls genuinely doing the work who are mixed into it.

Just let people self-select as AI-users or not and publish two lists.

I didn't really learn anything new

This is the most disappointing part for me. Once I figured out the Rust syntax to parse the input text on the first day, that was basically the extent of my new learning. Everything else was just annoying array operations.

Personally, this wasn't a very useful learning exercise for me. If you're of a very particular mindset where you don't already know how to program but you want to learn it without having anything to show for your trouble, Advent of Code might be the way to go.

But I would personally recommend you use Advent of Code only for keeping your coding skills fresh on a vacation, or during a slow period at work. Instead, I would recommend you learn web development by doing projects that can go into a portfolio.

I am still happy I stuck with it

It still feels good to have finished the Advent of Code 2024, even if it's arbitrary and not particular useful for my own career or learning development. It did help keep my coding skills fresh, so kudos for that.