Category: AdventOfCode

Welcome back after a long, much-needed break! Hopefully, you’ve had time to reenergize and are now ready to start 2024 with a bang! Thankfully, the elves were semi-nice to us for part 2 and only slightly changed their requests and wanted us to find the first number in the solution instead of the last. If…

And so day 9 begins. Today, our elves are working hard on having us come up with the next number in a sequence. Thankfully, they do give us a few good examples to walk through on how they would like us to do it. And with that, it’s off to the races! As always, we…

With Day 8 part 1 being all about traversing tables, I’m sure our little friends the elves will find a new way to make this harder for us. First, we find out that we’re now starting with multiple positions – anything that ends with an A – and finishing anywhere that ends in a Z.…

Day 8 is gonna be fun-filled and exciting I can tell it from here! To make life a little simpler for all of us, I used a variable that I just pasted my instructions into. In my case, I called it @FollowThis allowing it to be up to 300 characters in length. Hopefully, no one’s…

So, we got tired of playing Camel Cards and decided to throw some Jokers into the mix. This time, our wonderful friends the elves have decided that they don’t like Jacks but they do like Jokers. So, there are a few changes to our code that will need to be made: For our wonderful #Hands…

No longer are we racing… Now, we’re playing cards. Not just any cards though. This time we’re playing Camel Cards – if you get the gist of poker, you can get Camel Cards fairly quickly. As always, have some fun trying different ways to push the data into your SQL Server. Why not try using…

Yet again those little elves have been devilish and messed up our input format. This time, they put spaces in our data. Sadly, this does make our numbers rather large, so we’re back to using the big ole Tally table we created for Walking Through Advent of Code Day 5. This time I made it…

Today we’re going racing! Sadly, it’s so not F1 or NASCAR racing. Snail racing is more like it since we’re moving millimeters by the end, but at least we’re closer to getting snow back to the elves, so let’s go racing! Given a few numbers that are times and current record distances, this actually doesn’t…

Part One of Day 5 had lots of reference tables. And, as always, our elves have changed the rules of the game with part 2. This time, the meaning of the seed numbers is slightly changing on us. Instead of it only being 20 seeds we have to cross-reference (at least that’s how many seeds…

Yes, that’s right my friends! We have reached day 5! There was a lot going on with this one, so let’s go ahead and get started. First thing we want to do, as always, is to go ahead and load all of our data into SQL Server. With this one, I cheated a little and…