Advent of Code

Starting in 2020, I’ve made it a personal goal to complete Advent of Code in a new language every year. In 2020, I kicked this tradition off with Golang.

2020

This year I decided to pick up Go after watching a free conference hosted by the folks at Dgraph. This was an awesome way to stretch my legs with Go and get comfortable with the syntax and built-in data structures of Go. All my solutions are on my Github.

Noteworthy puzzles

• Day 10
  • The first part of the puzzle was easy to solve with built-in sorting functions and iteration, but the second part convinced me to build a graph of every adapter and the other adapters they are compatible with. This solution worked, but desperately needed optimization. In came memoization (a topic that never came up in my EE curriculum).
• Day 20
  • This was a fun puzzle, but it was also mean. It essentially required you to implement transforms (mirrors and rotations) on 2d boolean arrays and also correlate the edges of the arrays with each other to figure out their position and orientation in a larger image. It took quite a bit of pen and paper sketching to come up with a sensible coordinate system and accurate transforms.