I do advent of code for a number of reasons, while people I know, who could do it, skip it. And I try to quantify why I will sacrifice sleep in order to do it!

This post is inspired by my daily posts in my company's backend dev channel about AOC that go without interactions! It's been discussed in the past, and no one else does it either because of time required, or lack of interest or maybe lack of classical training in related fields.

So I thought why I do it and why I will probably never not do it. There are a few reasons.

I LOVE PUZZLES

I've always loved logic puzzles and word puzzles. Not every puzzle type or puzzle, mind you, but I'll definitely give them a try. I do the NYT puzzles every day, namely in Connections, Spelling Bee, and Wordle. I crave them. So every December I get to do a few more puzzles.

I get to use Computer Science

In day to day activities in a job that deals with content management, or in some cases, golf stats and live scoring, I don't get to use a lot of neat algorithms that I learned in school or afterwards.

I get to learn new stuff

I learn something every year. This year, for instance, it was the shoelace formula and Pick's Theorem. I learn that I still know how to solve problems :)

I reinforce what I know

Gotta keep fresh in case something comes up that involves a tree or a linked list!

I get to write Go

Go is by far my favorite language. However, I've also been doing these puzzles in Rust, albeit at a much slower pace. I did day 1 :)

It essentially comes downt to how I like to or want to spend my time. It's fine that not everyone wants to do AOC, but I really want to. It could be some people would rather watch their favorite TV show after a long day of work. Or watch sports, or spend have homework and family time, or want to sleep. That's totally understandable. It's just that, even if I have those things, for all of the reasons stated above, I WILL set aside time, or make time (at the expense of sleep), to do Advent of Code. It's just one month anyway :)