this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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Advent Of Code
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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev! Other challenges are also welcome!
Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
Everybody Codes is another collection of programming puzzles with seasonal events.
EC 2025
AoC 2025
Solution Threads
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
Rules/Guidelines
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep all content related to advent of code in some way
- If what youre posting relates to a day, put in brackets the year and then day number in front of the post title (e.g. [2024 Day 10])
- When an event is running, keep solutions in the solution megathread to avoid the community getting spammed with posts
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Icon base by Lorc under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient
console.log('Hello World')
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Javascript
I generally like trying the brute force approach first (though in the latter days it just wastes time). After exhausting 32GB of RAM I changed approaches.
Admittedly I don't really understand these algorithms as well as I would like, and I also will admit I inadvertently was LLM assisted :(. When I was trying to figure out what algo I should use and the AI summary in Google's search spoiled me. But I did learn alot.
One interesting observation, unrelated to the solution itself, is the solutions runs about 30% faster in Firefox than it does via Node (25.2.1 and 24.11.1) on my machine.
Code
That is surprising about Firefox - you'd have thought something that literally just runs JavaScript would be able to beat Firefox with all the UI, sandboxing, etc. 30% is a huge margin.