This year I tried to participate in Advent of Code again. As every year, I start out motivated - this time I wanted to use AoC as an opportunity to use Go more and get to know the language better - and as every year, I lost motivation within a couple of days and have now basically stopped participating at all.

Overall I really like the idea of AOC, especially how many devs from all around the world participate in it. However when it comes to actually doing those challenges every day, I just get to a point where I really lose the motivation to stick to it. Especially when considering that I’m already spending over 8 hours a day programming in my day job. So when I’m done with work for the day, I’m often struggling to find the energy to work on something software related in the evening as well.

Another reason is that while these tasks are overall quite short and focused on one specific topic, they can actually get quite complicated when it comes to catching all the edge cases (especially in part 2 of most tasks). So I often ask myself if it is worth using my free time to solve these problems instead of at least working on an actual pet project that I’ll continue working on for a longer time.

I have to admit that it’s mostly laziness & a lack of energy.

However, it turns out that I’m substantially worse in Go than I thought lol - initially didn’t want to do the exercises in a language that I knew better, like C# for example. But already on the second day I started to switch to C# in order to at least get some of the exercises done at all. Go does some stuff quite differently than I’m used to (I can’t modify a string in a for loop, really?), so I struggled with topics that would be a no-brainer in C#.

So I definitely need more practice with Go & I’m probably quitting Advent of Code for this year at least.