My goal for this year's Advent of Code was to do as many problems as I could without using any hints or consulting soutions. I'm pleased to say that I did exactly that that and finished all the problems by the 25th to boot! It's a real confidence booster because I attempted AOC last year but got stuck frequently and even when I looked at hints I didn't think I could have come up with the insights required on my own.

I think a large part of my AOC success this year came from a change in attitude that I had after failing an OA earlier in the year. On the OA my 'efficiently guess the solution by pattern matching the whole question' approach failed and finally made me reconsider it. I ended up realizing that I needed to improve my skills at systematically attacking a problem — the quick and dirty approch had gotten me pretty far but was ultimately a dead end. My new approach has been to treat each problem with more respect, and to keep in mind that the process of solving the problem is more valuable than getting the correct solution.

With this philosophy towards the problems, I found AOC 2024 to be fun and a good match for my capabilities. I also ended up enjoying the hardest problems the most.

Here's a link to my solutions.

Blogs have been built since the dawn of the web and are essentially a solved problem. In 2024 the real challenge is choosing which of the many capable technologies to use and not getting hit with analysis paralysis.

Of all the static site generators, I went with Docusaurus because:

• It's super simple to get up and running
• You can write React in the markdown (and I ❤️ ⚛)
• It's pretty by default
• It has Meta's backing and is a healthy project with excellent documentation

I made sure to deploy my Docusaurus to the Github Pages the day I started the project (2 days ago). Why? I was half inspired by this comment on Hacker News about building a compiler 'horizontally', and half concerned that if I didn't push it that night I'd chicken out on the whole blog idea.