Chris Kaczor

Back Again

When I started this blog I had recently been laid off and figured it was as good a time as any to give some visibility to the code I had been creating over the years rather than hoarding it like a jealous dragon. I intended to keep up with it but then I started a new job and the writing sort of fell by the wayside. I kept working on projects when I could but never really got the chance to write about them. I'm hoping to be a bit more consistent this time around but only time will tell.

I've been mostly working on completely recreating my home monitoring project with both new hardware and software - I'll write more about that in upcoming posts.

For the last week or so I've been doing Advent of Code 2019 so that I can follow along with my son. He got a good head start due to a few snow days at the beginning of the month but I've gotten ahead of him a bit as the challenges have gotten harder. We just spent some time getting his Intcode computer for day 9 working properly and I nearly swore off the entire contest while doing the second part of day 12 - the coding for that part wasn't really a problem but it took me a bit to figure out the concept for doing it without brute force. I think it would have been more fair if the challenge better explained how to solve the problem and left the coding up to the participant but that's probably just me being whiny. =) We've been posting our code in our GitHub repos in case anyone wants a peek:

I've been working in C# and he has been doing it in Python so it has been interesting to compare the two languages. I've been trying to get him to debug with breakpoints in Visual Studio Code rather than going old-school with print statements. It is definitely a process but we're getting there!