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It's also okay to just do the problems without the competitive aspect. I love competitions and all, but sure as hell I'm not waking up at 5AM for an entire month in the pursuit of internet points.

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My main use case for AoC is practice with new languages. So I tend to prefer to do the same one from several years ago over and over, because then I can focus on grokking the language and not the problem, and I can compare my solutions across languages to get a better feel for how they affect how I solve problems.

The leaderboard is occasionally interesting to me for the first week of December, but, realistically, I can't see getting invested in it without also moving far, far to the west of where I live now.

Thought about that last year. You wouldn't have your solutions public but any chance?

Don’t you risk solving the problem in suboptimal or just “wrong” ways for the language you’re trying?

I also check out how other people did it on GitHub. But only after I've taken a crack at it myself first.

I don’t know about others but I‘be found AoC is quite good for naturally discovering how you’ve solved a problem “wrong” or sub-optimally when you get to Part 2.

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