Last year was the first year I did Advent of Code, a 25 day series of programming challenges of escalating difficulty, and I bailed out at around day 16 when I hit the limits of my actual CS knowledge as opposed to "being good with Pandas".
I read a bunch of books about algorithms and systems since then, and it's day 17 of 2022, and I've hit a limit. There were a couple of clever moments, one day where I could use eval() to avoid writing a recursive string parser, another day where I pruned a search tree that was exploding exponentially to get a solution that ran in 10 minutes rather than until the sun exploded.
Day 17 is Tetris, with falling blocks making a tower. It's my best code so far, an actually elegant object-oriented approach that matches the test examples perfectly. Except it doesn't hold for the real thing, and I'm not sure why.
Going to persist a little longer, and maybe see what Day 18 looks like.