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 2022 Day 1 cruising log.
This year I was ready for the 5 am start as I erupted out of bed at 4.50 am in order to solve the first puzzle. It’s weirdly exciting like that feeling during Christmas’ morning where you rush to see what present you got before watching cartoons.
However, I forgot that I don’t have IntelliJ on my personal laptop anymore since I did a complete wipe-out a few months ago to downgrade from Windows 11 to Windows 10. As a result, I had to quickly download and install it before 5 am. Indeed, I managed to do it in the nick of time and rushed to do the first puzzle.
Having skipped my nigh-daily espresso, my brain as a bit fuzzy. Still, once my eyes were fully open I gathered the details of the puzzle. I guess I wasn’t the only one having Domino’s pizzas and booze with friends while watching the football World Cup games. Why? I hear you ask, because the first problem was all about calories counting. Literally. Not an insanely complex task but complexity is bound to how awake you are. Submitted the second part of the puzzle by 5.18 am so it was a fair start but still not enough to be in the first hundred.
Generally this is how it goes for first days, some people use some sort of machine learning to solve the first problems. While it does work, it does feel like cheating so I don’t feel like I’ll join that gang anytime soon. Plus the point is having fun writing code, not pumping it from other (non) people.
Call me old fashioned but I have more respect for someone picking up a puzzle late in the day or after work. Even if it takes them days to solve that puzzle. I much prefer that than those who cheat to get nice rankings. These rankings then lose meaning for the first ten days or so as the puzzles gain in complexity. That is generally around that time that I can join the first hundred coders to finish a puzzle.
Until then I shall keep enjoying these warmup puzzles.
Thank you for reading my Advent of Code 2022 Day 1 log, I will see you tomorrow. As usual I will push the code to my repo for this year on Github.
Cover by Muffin Creatives
