AdventOfCode 2023

It’s that time of year again. Time to commit to participating in AdventOfCode 2023 only to not finish it. In seriousness, I’ve tried to finish for a few years but always find other commitments get in the way. Nevertheless, I am going to be doing Advent of Code 2023!

Instead of releasing a post per challenge (and utterly embarrassing myself when they stop at day 4 like in 2019), I’ll try and do more of a summary of some days, either as I go or in the post Christmas period.

Initially, I wanted to use Advent of Code to jump start learning the Zig programming language. However, I found myself floundering at the first hurdle, reading files into memory. Zig is quite a new language, and as a consequence it has a sparse amount of documentation associated with it. This really hindered by ability to build fast. For example, the basic Reader in the Zig standard library is currently deprecated in favour of undocumented alternatives, but other documentation hasn’t been updated to reflect this.

So in the spirit of solving the actual Advent of Code challenges, I opted to use Python instead. And while I use Python often, I wouldn’t call myself an expert in it, and it definitely isn’t my first choice of language when faced with a problem. So hopefully solving the Advent of Code challenges in it will brush up my Pythonic knowledge.

At time of writing, I’ve already solved the 2 Day 1 challenges. With the part 2 having an annoying gotcha around where number words can overlap in a string which threw me for a moment. My solution to this included a Regular Expression which helped shorten my code considerably.