First, some context. I've been programming for almost ten years. I first started learning Pascal with a Brazilian IDE called Pascalzim back in 2014. After my first attempts at code, I fell in love with it; I could write code and solve coding problems in an entire day. When I started college in 2017, I joined the competitive programming club (not exactly a club but something similar). I felt like my purpose was to write these codes that can solve problems and see my name in the rankings. Competing and learning from smarter people than me was a joy.
But as the years passed, I began to work as a full-stack developer at a kind of big company. The first months were great; I was getting paid to do what I loved.
But the days passed, and more and more I was not doing side projects, I was not learning anything new, I was not solving any problems.
I was just adjusting things in the product, discussing story points with my team, and working in a tech that was becoming more obsolete every second.
For some months now, I've been unable to work on new projects that I like. Every tiny thing blocked me. Not in a way like, I can't do that, but more like “Eh, I could do that, but it's too much trouble.”
But 01 December I gather some friends and asked: “Have you guys know about the advent of code?”, none of them had, so I explained and they like the idea.
We started on day one of course, and although the first part of the issue as straight forward.
The second part really got us, and I had to go back to my C days writing code to solve competitive programming challenges. That took my joy of writing code back.
I don't know if much of you guys feel like me, that you don't really enjoy writing code or thinking, but AoC is helping me. You cloud try!
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