Re:Advent of Code 2024
by hoistbypetard on Sunday December 01, 2024 @12:54PM
(#42289673)
I agree. Intcode was fun, but completely destroyed the promise of skipping a day and still having fun with later puzzles. I didn't come to enjoy it until much later.
I agree that it wasn't completely well-received, and I think this is a real shame. The stated goal of Advent of Code was always to make better programmers. Extending, maintaining, and testing large systems is an important part of real-world engineering efforts.
I thought the IntCode thing was great and I hope to see something like that again this year.
People are skipping days? I usually drop out when I'm stuck on some day. 2019 was my favorite.
Most years I've skipped a couple days and revisit them later. Usually just because I give myself 1-2 hours limit to avoid staying up too late working on them, and unless it's the weekend I don't always have time during the next day to wrap them up. No reason to stop just because of a single blocker.
The problem with continuity across days is that the later days can be blocked by the earlier ones, as they were in 2019. That partly defeats the purpose (or structure) of the challenge, where you can mostly pick any day and try it without regard to earlier days or prior years.