r/adventofcode

In this post, I want to thank Eric, the Advent of Code team, and the entire community.

Last year (2024) was my first year participating, and it turned out to be incredibly inspiring for me. At the time, I had a problem: for some reason I couldn't dedicate enough time to self-learning and working on my pet projects, work felt like it was draining all of my energy. But after almost a month of solving problems every day, I decided that this practice should continue.

Over the course of the entire year, I learned something every single day, solved problems from different areas of computer science, and broadened my horizons. I worked on my pet projects without exceptions, even on weekends. Sometimes it was hard, sometimes easier, but after a year I feel a huge amount of progress, which gives me the motivation to keep going.

As for 2025, I really liked the 12-day format. During this period, you don't have time to get tired, and overall it feels like the contest flies by in one breath. This year had a lot of interesting and great problems.

My favorite was , I even tried to solve it on the GPU. In the end, the performance was about the same as on the CPU, but maybe I just need to improve my GPU programming skills🙂

The most controversial day for me was probably . After several hours of struggling with Part 2, I decided to check Reddit to see how others solved it, and I was surprised that many people used Z3. For me, it felt like the problem shifted from programming to math, though I might be wrong.

Once again, thanks to the Advent of Code team for the wonderful and inspiring problems, and for the great weeks I got to spend doing what I love. Thanks to the community for all the inspiring visualizations, solutions, and discussions. All of this pushes us to become better and grow.

Thank you all so much, happy holidays, and see you next year!

My C# AoC Repo -