This is one of the game changes I have discovered this year. I love AOC as an opportunity to learn a new programming language. The whimsical stories for each problem remind us to not take things too seriously and just help out some elves or cephalopods with finding Santa or arranging presents.
Here is a list of implementations I did for 2025:
- Modulo
- Sliding windows
- Heaps
- Grid search + recursion
- Heaps
- Implemented a wacky calculator
- 1D rolling dynamic programming
- Graphs, Depth first search, BTrees
- Grid search, Breadth first search, compressed coordinate systems and ray casting
- Breadth first search, xor, linear programming solver
- Graphs and breadth first search
- Realised a problem is NP Hard and impossible to solve so realise I was being trolled!
Doing AOC in Rust allowed me to slowly get used to the syntax and borrow checker. After a few days, I found myself having to debug my code less than in python because the borrow checker was able to catch any bugs early on.
Some of the problems were incredibly difficult this year requiring very late nights and a peek at the memes. Finishing each day and enjoying the memes with others really got me into the Christmas spirit! Undoubtedly, completing AOC 2025 is one of my proudest achievements yet. Next, I shall complete 2024 in Python then start on 2023 in C++!
If you are interested to see my solutions, see the Github link below!
itszrong
Thank you to Eric Wastl for one of the best pedagogical phenomenons ever.
