With December coming up, we get to reflect on the year before. I have a lot of thoughts about those, but considering this is a blog about my projects, I'll hold on to those for therapy. The point of this post is to announce my new hub for my Advent of Code puzzles! I put about 2 days of work into it, so it may be buggy, but I am proud of it.
In the AOC Hub, you can see my solutions, writeups, and visualizations for each day as well as track the number of stars for each day. Each year for Advent of Code, I like to revamp my tool suite for it and try to build off of it. My first year was 2019, where I got the tail end of it and didn't compete really; however, it made me want to try for the full month. 2020 came around and (obviously) was a weird year. But, and I say this with not much excitement, there were some positives. I really focused my programming skills and worked on some Advent of Code puzzles before December to try and get warmed up. This is when I created my first Advent of Code manager scripts, which just generated files and allowed me to run them. It was janky and my scripts were copied and ran without much standardization, but it worked. Advent of Code 2020 hit and it was the most fun I had with a coding-related event ever. Looking back on it, I would still say it was better than 2021 or 2022, but maybe that's the rose-tinted glasses on my face.
Then, with Advent of Code 2021, I revamped the tools to allow for automatic input fetching and puzzle run from a command line tool. This heavily sped up my production and the bulk of my puzzle solving was done this year. 2022 cam around and I once again revamped with writeups and readmes, being able to show and talk about my progress in text form. For this year, Advent of Code 2023, I wanted to have a front-end to show everything off. It just so happened that recently, I made an upgrade to STEVE that allows for much easier site generation (which created the blogs you are reading right now), so I used that tool to create a front-end. I was also inspired by this Reddit post that has a full front-end that allowed to run different inputs. I didn't need this much, but creating was is there was fun. I took the look the Advent of Code made and ran with it. Snowflakes, glowing links and stars, the brackets around the links.
In addition to the new front-end, a new set of tools was also developed that runs more efficently and caches pretty much everything, so it doesn't bother the AOC servers more than an actual human would. I am also making a clean sheet with the puzzles and resolving them with my current knowledge. All my old code is backed up so it isn't removed, but I always like seeing my progress of knowledge.
Thanks everybody for reading! I'm so excited for Advent of Code 2023!