Slightly off-topic: I have an honest question for all of you out there who love Advent of Code, please don't take this the wrong way, it is a real curiosity: what is it for you that makes the AoC challenge so special when compared with all of the thousands of other coding challenges/exercises/competitions out there? I've been doing coding challenges for a long time and I never got anything special out of AoC, so I'm really curious. Is it simply that it reached a wider audience?
I have only had some previous experience with Project Euler, which I liked for the loop of "try to bruteforce it -> doesn't work -> analyze the problem, exploit patterns, take shortcuts". (I hit a skill ceiling after 166 problems solved.)
Advent of Code has this mass hysteria feel about it (in a good sense), probably fueled by the scarcity principle / looking forward to it as December comes closer. In my programming circles, a bunch of people share frustration and joy over the problems, compete in private leaderboards; there are people streaming these problems, YouTubers speedrunning them or solving them in crazy languages like Excel or Factorio... it's a community thing, I think.
If I wanted to start doing something like LeetCode, it feels like I'd be alone in there, though that's likely false and there probably are Discords and forums dedicated to it. But somehow it doesn't have the same appeal as AoC.
I think the corny stories about how the elves f up and their ridiculous machines and processes add a lot of flavor.
It is not as dry as Project Euler for example, which is great in its own right.
And you collect ASCII art golden stars!
I think one is the feeling of community - we have a workplace leaderboard and we compete with each other, discuss solutions to the problems, how we overcame them etc.
The second is the timing and pacing - the fist few days are about warming up, then comes a couple decently challenging puzzles, after which the whole thing gets very difficult. Having the discipline to actually spend the time every day to do the puzzles feels like going back to the gym and actually sticking to it.
I also get to solve these kind of coding puzzles at work very rarely - maybe once every couple of months - so the whole thing feels like an intense workout for my brain.
The downside is of course is that it's exhausting - later puzzles often took 1-2 hours for me to solve - during days where I have work related stress, this is not easy.
For me, it's a bunch of things. It happens once a year, so it feels special. Many of my friends (and sometimes coworkers) try it as well, so it turns into something to chat about. Because they're one a day they end up being timeboxed, I can focus on just hammering out a solution or dig in and optimize but I can't move on so when I'm done for the day I'm done. It's also pretty nostalgic for me, I started working on it in high school.
