advent of code

ok so basically

i'm doing advent of code again

join my shark-themed private leaderboard!!! send me a DM for the code on masto or something (don't reply to this blog post i might not see it). the semi-official chat for it is just the blåhaj-ctf matrix channel

my code is located here: https://git.lain.faith/haskal/aoc2020
like last year, i'm doing it in racket. despite knowing racket a lot better than when i was using it last year, i'm doing racket again because i feel like there's still a lot of space to explore in writing creative and concise solutions using stdlib (and some choice non-stdlib) functionality

my goals for this year's effort are to write (or at least end up with) clean, readable, and concise code. the actual readability aspect will be prioritized over efficiency in cases where efficiency doesn't matter that much, and i'm going to make a good effort to create solutions for part 1 of each challenge that end up being as extensible as possible to part 2, even when i don't know what part 2 will be yet (this is one part of advent of code that can get pretty interesting, and the part that really trains you to be a better SWE if you pay attention to it)

i'm currently up-to-date with day 4, and my repo additionally contains scripts i've developed for interacting with the AoC system, some of which could be reused even if you're not doing racket

• scripts/get-challenge <n>: display's the nth day's challenge page, roughly styled to a (256color) terminal
• scripts/get-input <n>: downloads the input file for day n
• scripts/submit-answer <day> <part> <answer>: submits an answer. my template for solution scripts includes a bit of code i wrote that automatically submits answers as soon as they are calculated without error using the code behind this script

if you're using racket, scripts/template.rktrkt is my template (in scribble that outputs racket :3), scripts/make-day creates a new solution script according to the template, and scripts/*.rkt is the support code for interacting with the AoC server and recording which problems have been successfully submitted

you can see my day 2 code as an example

(module+ main
  (define input (file->lines "inputs/2"))
  ;; part 1
  (answer 2 1 (calculate password-valid-part1? input))
....

when run for the first time, it'll prompt

$ racket 2.rkt
answer 2.1: <answer>
submit? [Y/n]: 

hit y or enter and it submits. pretty handy if i do say so myself (i do)

that's all for now

i'm having a lot of fun with AoC so far even though the challenges are still uninteresting (it's week 1, of course)

let's hacking~ !!