Advent of Code 2021

This is just a quick update on the upcoming posts schedule.

Last year I’ve decided to participate in Advent of Code 2020. It was a bit late decision, as I’ve started doing tasks around December 14th, and was burnt out by the pace I had to maintain to keep up with the others. It didn’t go so well, and I only completed tasks for the first 14 days, the last submission was on December 28, and I’ve got 28 gold stars total¹. It’s a shame that I couldn’t finish the event in time, but it was fun, and this year I’ve decided not to repeat the same mistake and join the event when it starts.

For those unfamiliar with AOC, this event usually has some pretty interesting puzzles, and some kind of story, that progresses each day, and each task leads to another task and the story continues. And since the tasks are pretty interesting, I’ve decided to start a small series of posts, where I express how I’ve approached the task, and what tricks I’ve used to accomplish it.

I hope that I’ll be able to maintain the pace, and publish one post per day through the first 25 days of December until the event is finished. My blog is mostly built around Fennel and Emacs, but I’ll be doing the tasks in Clojure, as I feel that I’m giving this language less time than I should. I’ve also thought about using another language, like Erlang/Elixir or Common Lisp, but decided to go with Clojure, because learning a new language, and going through puzzles, while writing posts about both topics, and doing normal life stuff is a bit too much to handle. So Clojure it is.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish all puzzles, but we’ll see how it goes. If you’re a programmer, and you never participated in AOC, I highly recommend you to - it’s great fun and a good challenge!

That’s all for now, see you on December 1st!