Hello everyone, it’s been a year already since last taking on this challenge. Rejoice! The new Advent of Code season has begun. Time for your Advent of Code 2021 Day 1 cruising log.
Last night, I was still pondering what I should go for after an exciting football game where I scored 4. Doesn’t happen often so had to mention that. Unfortunately, that and other things led to my going to bed around midnight last night so woke up only at 7.30ish. As a result, moult of my colleagues already completed today’s challenge while I was dreaming deep.
Not the best start if you’re going for the top spots but this year I decided to only show up rather than compete for the top spots. Last year I finished second in our London office and seventh on the company global leaderboard waking up each morning at 5 am with a workout to open my mind before each challenge would drop. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, this was quite demanding so I decided not to do that this year.
Before heading to bed last night, I had chosen to use the familiar Java with a tool I don’t tend to use it with: Visual Studio Code. This proved to be a mistake as time and time again using the wrong shortcuts wasted fair amounts of time. After about ten minutes I decided to open IntelliJ and load my maven project from there. Was much easier and it took me another ten minutes to complete the challenge.
Not the craziest challenge as it was mostly about summing things but we do need something easy enough. Otherwise, how would you get first-timers motivated to believe they can make it to the end? I know experienced developers who dodge these challenges saying they don’t have time for these games. I sense fear, fear not to be good enough when those challenges are about fun and pushing yourself. Even though I won’t push myself as hard as last year, I’ll push myself just enough to show up each and every day.
Thank you for reading my Advent of Code 2021 Day 1 log, I will see you tomorrow. As usual I will push the code to my repo for this year on Github.
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