advent of code
my journey through advent of code 2025. daily programming challenges, solutions, optimizations, and the lessons learned along the way. from debugging nightmares to algorithmic insights, follow along as i tackle each puzzle.
this year i'm doing a showdown with my good friend Levi. since aoc is twelve days long this year, we'll be solving the puzzles in twelve different languages. keep an eye out for his posts here.
advent of code 2025 - day 5: cafeteria
05-12-2025day 5 was supposed to be simple: count ids in ranges. beating a 0.4ms target meant ditching clever data structures for primitive arrays, cache-friendly loops, and a JVM warmup trick.
read more →advent of code 2025 - day 3: lobby
03-12-2025day 3 of advent of code 2025 was less about algorithmic breakthroughs and more about squeezing every last millisecond out of python. levi had a 1.4ms solution. i was determined to beat it.
read more →advent of code 2025 - day 2: gift shop
02-12-2025day 2 of advent of code 2025 had me learning lua from scratch while discovering that sometimes the best optimization isn't faster code—it's realizing you're solving the wrong problem entirely.
read more →advent of code 2025 - day 1: secret entrance
01-12-2025day 1 kicked off this year's advent of code with a deceptively simple puzzle that taught me a painful lesson about testing, debugging, and how bugs can cancel each other out.
read more →