For prior days, please check out my Advent of Code 2025 Overview post. To see my final solution for this puzzle, go here. Puzzle It appears all the elevators in the Lobby are broken and it has become our responsibility to fix them. Part 1 Part 1 Solution Parsing Input Data Solution Part 2 Part 2 Solution
If you haven’t already, I recommend referring to my introduction post to AOC2025 here, and you can see my solution here. Puzzle The Advent of Code story starts out with us arriving in the North Pole and working to save Christmas by setting up all the decorations by December 12th. In order to begin decorating, we need to gain access to the Secret Entrance, and to do that we need to figure out the door’s password. The password is hidden in a safe, and a cheat sheet (puzzle input) has been provided that allows access to the safe. The safe has a classic circular dial with values ranging from 0 to 99. ...
For prior days, please check out my Advent of Code 2025 Overview post. To see my final solution for this puzzle, go here. Puzzle After yesterday’s Day 1: Secret Entrance solution, we now have access to the North Pole. Once we enter, we notice that the Gift Shop is having issues because an elf was playing around and added invalid IDs to the database. In order to save the day, we must go through the database (Puzzle Input) and find all invalid product IDs. ...
What is Advent of Code? Advent of Code is a series of programming puzzles created by Eric Wastl that come out every year in December. Everything you need to know can be found on the official Advent of Code page, but to simplify: every day a two-part puzzle is released. You can only access part two after completing part one. Every person receives a unique input, so no two answers should be exactly the same. Other than that, there are no real rules—it’s simply about thinking through a fun (and sometimes annoying) problem until you arrive at a solution. ...
AI Hype 🚀 Over the past year AI hype has gotten out of hand. With the cultral populatiry of OpenAI and the general leap in sucess the space has seen in the past couple of years this hype isn’t unfounded. People outside the tech industry are increasingly recognizing how transformative these technologies can be, potentially displacing jobs on a scale similar to the Industrial Revolution. This is causing a rush by practically every industry to be at the forefront of these developments. I, on the other hand, have been extremly wary of these tools. I tried my best to avoid them unil Nordic SemiConductor added an AI assistant to their Dev Zone. These microcontroller companies have a ton of resources however they are spread out through forums, app notes, white papers, and data sheets. This makes it a pain to locate and process without an FAEs help. This was the first time I used AI and felt it was genuinly useful. The tool would find a relevant response and do its best. It was often wrong, however, it was close enough that somone familiar with the technology could peace together a solution. ...
Coming Soon…
Why did I start this? Honestly, I blame this entire journey on two people: Beau and Chris. As 2024 came to an end, I decided to focus on improving my coding skills. For the first time ever, I participated in Advent of Code and to make it even more challenging, I completed it entirely in a language that was completely new to me—Zig.1 This sparked a series of tangents, including learning RayLib, attempting to create a browser-based game, and eventually diving into Go to build an HTTP server. ...