Advent of Code started a couple of days ago, and I am, of course, at least starting to take on the puzzles. I have tried two years prior to solve the daily puzzles but never got far. To my defense, I think that is largely due to the fact that I chose, at least last year, to try to solve them using Haskell, a functional programming language with which I am only a little familiar. I took a course in university where we dabbled with Haskell, so I’m not entirely fresh on it, but it became too time-consuming to solve the puzzles each day, so I gave up after like 4 or 5 days last year.
This year, I am not trying to learn a new language. I am sticking with what I know works for me, which is TypeScript. I am, however, trying some other stuff in the process: Deno and the IDE Zed. Deno is easy to get going with, and I have been looking for a reason to try it, so this was the perfect opportunity. Zed I have downloaded before and only tried a little but thought I would give it a try again and see how I like it. To make it interesting, I turn off Copilot as well when doing the puzzles. Feels like cheating otherwise.
My goal for this year is to get to day 10.
I save most of my embarrassing code for each day to my GitHub repo.