I made it through 3 days before giving up. My daughter got sick, I fell behind, and I realized I was in way over my head. Challenges that took me a couple of hours were done in a few minutes by others. But I still learned a lot.
Even though I stopped doing the challenges, I still watch videos to see how others are doing them. I'm learning what I still need to learn and learn better ways to do things I already know.
In addition to all my programming failures I realized a few life lessons I learned doing the few challenges I did.
Pay attention to the details.
I've always been a big picture guy. Programming and AOC has taught me the importance of focusing on the details.
Break big problems into smaller ones.
I guess that's all programming really is but AOC really hit me over the head with this lesson.
Read all the directions.
A lot of my time being frustrated was because I didn't read ALL the directions. I wrote a solution, entered my answer, and got told I was wrong. Looked through all my code and every thing seemed fine. After about an hour reread the directions and realized I was solving the wrong problem.
Conclusion.
So even though I failed at the AOC it wasn't a total failure. I still learned a lot and found many topic that were new to me that will require further study. In the last post I said I was going to post my code to GitHub but I'm not. My code is too embarrassing and understanding GitHub better is one of the many skills I need to improve upon.
