The puzzles are released each day at the same time - 5am UK time (I think it's midnight Eastern Standard Time but don't hold me to that) - and people race for t

The puzzles are released each day at the same time - 5am UK time (I think it's midnight Eastern Standard Time but don't hold me to that) - and people race for the first correct answers. Check last year's leaderboards and look how fast people answer: https://adventofcode.com/2018/leaderboard/day/1 https://adventofcode.com/2018/leaderboard/day/1 You don't have to race, it isn't required, but the people who do race are very very quick off the draw - they have scripts which login and download their data file as soon as it's available, then templated code ready to read it in as if it were numbers, as if it were a CSV, and load up some counter variables and arrays to save a few seconds typing, and they skim read ignoring the story, trying to jump to the calculation, code it in moments, run it, get an answer, paste into the site, and verify it. Then download the datafile for part two, skim read the story for part two, modify their code to handle it, run it, get an answer paste that in. First person did both those, all that, in 1 min 48 sec. (!) Toolkit is mostly "I've done this last year, know what held me up, or what patterns came up several times", you don't need one at all if you're not racing for the first 100 answers. btw. you can sign up now and do previous year's puzzles if you want to see what it's like.