Advent of Code 2024

It’s come again, Advent of Code 2024. I don’t think I have ever fully finished one of these, I probably came close in one of the earlier ones during the 2010’s.

Instead of polluting this blog with posts per day, I will do as I did in 2023 and post summaries and interesting bits based on where I get to.

Last year, I tried to use Advent of Code to learn Zig and ended up doing parts of it in Rust and Python. This year I am concentrating on my Python skills first and perhaps will return to problems with another programming language later.

I’ve already completed Day 1 of Advent of Code 2024. It was a nice and simple pair of challenges to get started, sorting lists and comparing values within them. Nothing too complicated.

I would advise anyone doing these challenges to keep efficiency in the back of their mind, because, in previous years, some of the inputs were quite large and did not lend themselves very well to brute force approaches. Normally, the challenges that require these efficient solutions are the second parts to each day.