aoc2015 VS ELDonationTracker

When I solved this, I cheated .... and used the exact comment you linked to make my solution for part 2 really simple: it's just a direct calculation with the number of "parentheses" and "commas": https://github.com/ednl/aoc2015/blob/main/day19.py

That's a great simple way of doing gradient descent (ascent, in this case..). I added that to my explanation of the example, which was far too long and complicated: you don't need to limit the search space, just start in the middle! Obviously that's not something that will work in general, but the puzzle is well-behaved enough. They usually are.

Same with my version: https://github.com/ednl/aoc2015/blob/main/day05.py

You're correct! There are no time limits; in fact, you can work on any puzzle from any year, which means you can even start from the beginning of Advent of Code 2015 if you wanted to!

This is the seventh year puzzles, if you want to check out previous years take a look at: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of 50 stars!) it’s time for that writeup. Before I continue, I’d like to thank everyone on the subreddit who has helped me. I have a README.md for each day’s problem and you’ll find my thanks to those who helped me within those READMEs here in my repo.

https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonationTracker depends on

http://djotaku.github.io/ELDonationTracker/ - for tracking donations to Extra Life and displaying when Live Streaming

Python - it’s my main language and the one in which I’m most proficient. I have written some programs used by many others (like my Extra Life Donation Tracker) and utilities that solve some problem I have (like my btrfs snapshot and backup program). By solving each problem in Python first, I allow myself to focus on the problem first instead of a syntax I’m unfamiliar with.

If you want to move to GUI programs, I recommend : Qt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook. Using QT Designer you can GUI programs pretty quickly. I used this book to create the GUI for my Extra Life project: http://djotaku.github.io/ELDonationTracker/

not sure if this is going beyond automation, but my most complex Python program which is actually used by other folks is for generating Donation Alerts while Live-Streaming to Twitch (or wherever) - http://djotaku.github.io/ELDonationTracker/

I use JSON and a dataclass (not a literal dataclass w/ the decorator and all). See ParticipantConf class starting line 103 https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonationTracker/blob/master/eldonationtracker/utils/extralife_io.py

In my project, here are the files that QT Designer saves: https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonationTracker/tree/master/QTdesignerfiles

I wanted to be able to use the Donation API when doing the Extra Life fundraiser, so I made: https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonationTracker

I'm using it for my program as well. It's really awesome, especially if you use qt designer. https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonationTracker