~/timpepper.dev/blog
[Thu Aug 15 2024]
You better believe I'm still procrastinating on my RSS Reader backend! It's okay though because I'm still doing some Rust learning / coding in the mean time.
I kept hearing about people picking up the 2023 Advent of Code, which isn't something I've heard of our thought about in a few years. What a great opportunity to apply my limited Rust knowledge!
Day 1: Trebuchet
I was pretty impressed right away with this one. I don't do a lot of string parsing in my day-to-day, and creating a program to pull the numbers out of a string, determine the first and last, and then add them was pretty fun. Definitely the type of scripting work I enjoy, and don't get to do very much...
The second part was pretty awesome too! I have never intentionally written a multi-threaded program before, but this seemed like a neat opportunity to try it out, given I was going to need to parse the same data set twice. I also have struggled a bit so far to wrap my head around the various Rust std lib thread tooling, so I have been looking for some practical ways to apply that knowledge. In the end I was able to parse the data sets concurrently, and mash the results together into a correct answer! Over-engineered? Probably... Worth it? Definitely!
Day 2: Cube Conundrum
This challenge wasn't nearly as difficult or tricky. Most of the challenge here was keeping track of string split levels, and dealing with some compiler errors I haven't experienced yet. In the end I was able to knock out both of the parts of this challenge in about an hour, which seemed pretty good to me!
I would definitely like to keep running through these challenges, especially if there's more tricky ones like Day 1. I imagine they only get more difficult over time! It also gives me more opportunity to mess with the Rust std library, where the personal projects I've been working on are more focused on using external crates for a lot of the heavy lifting.
I'm still really loving Rust! There's definitely some moments where I'm pulling my hair out because I still don't fully understand the lifetimes and borrow mechanics, but it is super satisfying writing a program that I can mostly trust (assuming there's no programmer error...), without any additional fiddling. I'm also consistently impressed with the speed of my programs. Unfortunately, with Node.js it's difficult to get micro-second level benchmarks on my functions, so getting to see these super quick run times in Rust is pretty foreign, but satisfying!