I haven’t done an advent of code before, but I’m going to give it a try this year! This is a perfect time to do this, as I feel some of my coding skills are slipping due to lack of use. You can follow my progress here: https://github.com/sj-wtf/advent-of-code-2023. I’m not aiming for any leaderboard, I’m not going for the most efficient or fewest lines of code in my solutions, I’ll be happy if I just find an answer without needing to look one up.

I’ve completed two day’s worth of challenges so far (each day consists of two challenges), and the second challenge of the first day was surprisingly hard. All the challenges so far have been ETL style data sanitization and string manipulation problems. The second one on the first day had some overlapping strings that both needed to be changed, so it was important to find each match first, then do the replacement operations.

I’m going to try to do most of these without imports if I can, that’ll make things a bit more interesting. None of the 4 for the last two days have required any, and they’ve both been pretty short regardless.

I’ll try to post again halfway through with some thoughts on the puzzles. Til then, see ya later!