Advent of Code progresses to the point where simple/brute force solutions fail to work and you have to use better datastructures/algorithms. Other performance

Advent of Code progresses to the point where simple/brute force solutions fail to work and you have to use better datastructures/algorithms. Other performance work has dependencies tending to be tied to a database, networked services, etc that's not so bite-sized and sharable. My early descent into programming was constantly battling with performance getting a 1.79 MHz Atari 8-bit to do interesting things in a 1/30 second. Maybe retrocomputing and writing software for vintage machines or recreated new machines that work like them might be a good challenge.