Table of Contents

Now that I have a couple years experience with Advent of Code, I’d like to get a little more organized prior to the contest. I’m hoping to create a blog post for most of the days, and I think I’ll make use of Ryan Culpepper’s IRacket package this year. IRacket allows creating Jupyter notebooks, and by exporting them as markdown files, they can be copy/pasted directly into a Frog static site generator file for a blog post. I thought about using only a notebook this year, but I think I would miss having a clutter-free version of just the code.

Advent of Code 2022 will start on December 1. This will be my third year, after participating in 2021 and 2020.

I hope to have time to code all of the solutions in Racket, my favorite programming language, and I should be able to translate some of them into Python and/or Javascript as a learning exercise.

My primary goal is to create an elegant Racket solution for each day’s puzzle that is clear, commented and tested. For some of the days, I may also create variants that emphasize performance or conciseness.

One of Haskell’s features I really liked was list comprehensions. I created a comparison between Haskell and Julia list comprehensions almost exactly a year ago. It appears that Python list comprehensions are as nice as either Haskell’s or Julia’s! Although, having to use Python’s lambda form to simulate the more concise Haskell/Julia function definition is less than ideal.

Advent of Code 2021 is about to start on December 1.

I recently converted a number of websites over to using Let’s Encrypt for SSL certificates, and the process was much easier than I expected.

I’ve come across the Fourier Transform a number of times, but I don’t think I ever developed a good intuition for what was going on. The following 3Blue1Brown video does a great job of providing that intuition.

One of Haskell’s features that I really liked was list comprehensions, so I was very pleased to discover how nice Julia’s comprehensions are!

This instructional movie from 1937 explains how a car’s differential gears work (to allow the driving wheels to turn at different speeds when cornering) in very easy to understand way! Modern tutorials could learn a lot from this.

A friend sent me the following videos that I found beautiful from a math & physics perspective.

I’ve been using wkhtmltopdf in Rails projects for years. After upgrading to Rails 6 and Ruby 2.6, PDF creation started failing for me. This post documents what I did to get it to work again.