I Finished the 9 Advents of Code: Lessons Learned
summary
A retrospective on nine years of Advent of Code solutions showing three concrete lessons: use topological sort to resolve dependency graphs (illustrated by a monkey-eval Day 21 example), prefer algorithmic improvements over naive parallelism (e.g., replacing brute force with binary search to reduce an 84s run to about 1s), and scale geometric problems by iterative coordinate clustering rather than brute-force checks (Day 23). The talk also reports a measurement that linked lists can be roughly 240% slower than arrays due to cache behavior.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction
- 7:24Algorithms and data structures
- 16:32Optimization and complexity
- 23:45Development best practices
- 35:14Problem-solving mindset
- 41:18Success and humility
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