It was interesting to me. I had to get up early due to the timezone I live in where AoC started at 6am. I didn't really try to make the leaderboard (even less a

It was interesting to me. I had to get up early due to the timezone I live in where AoC started at 6am. I didn't really try to make the leaderboard (even less after the first day when I learned how hard it is) but I was in a competitive mode and appropriately nervous. On later days I learned to calm down which also improved my performance. I was using Python which for me turned out to be the optimal programming language for problems like AoC. My reading of other solution on reddit confirms this. You often have to use maps (dictionaries) or lists and Python can be very concise in working with these. Also learned about convenience modules such as "collections" and defaultdict. Some people were able to produce concise and quite readable solutions with Numpy which I want to explore further in the future. Overall I was impressed to see that some people were able to produce short but still very readable Python programs as solutions to the problems. I gave up on day 8 when I didn't have the motivation to cut out the time between (or before) life, work and family to solve more and more complicated puzzles that became more and more arbitrary and didn't show any intrinsic motivation. (Although I did follow on some and found the CPU instruction set puzzle quite interesting).