First of all, if you have leaderboard points from Advent of Code, congrats. I would never want to diminish a hard-won speedrunning victory.
See, in Advent of Code, if you're one of the first 100 people in the world to submit your solution, you get points on a leaderboard. Most people get no points ever.
I'm thinking of what I would have to do to get points, and it would be to write messy code in my most-familiar language (Python), and just run it on the input right away instead of testing. And I don't want to do that. Writing horrible code that happens to work doesn't feel good.
I used to do TopCoder back when it was a fun competition that paid out real money to the winners (like 2000-2003). I got more money from it than my high school "job". I wrote so much horrible C++ to solve those coding tasks faster than anyone else I was matched against.
I would not consider myself to know C++.
I don't think I really knew it then, either. But I knew how to use a particular subset of the language, and a library of copy-pastable code I built up, to solve particular kinds of tasks quickly.
Back then, it was the highlight of my week! But I've written enough bad code for a lifetime.
