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2025 Review
Last year has been eventful and consequential. Until August I wrote my Master’s Thesis, and have now completed my university education. And in October I started working full time. In this post I will give a quick overview over this year and show new timetracking analysis!
Master’s Thesis
I started working on the broad topic late last year, but really got into it only this year. I worked investigating and evaluating the DDR protocol. I hope to write more about my work here in the near future.
Advent of Code
For the past 10 years in December, Advent of Code takes place. It is a series of small programming puzzles released daily from December 1st to December 25th. The first days are usually trivially easy, but the difficulty ramps up quickly, until at the end it takes multiple hours to come up with a working solution and implement that.
I started participating in 2020. In a time before LLMs, I actually completed every puzzle on the day it was released in Python, which took me many hours for the later challenges. After a successful first time, in 2021, I wanted to use the event as an opportunity to learn a new language, so I attempted to solve all puzzles in Rust. This was considerably more difficult because now I had to deal with the difficulty of the challenges and the borrow checker. That year, I was in Sweden, and remember well how I sat in a bus on the way to Lappland for more than a day, solving two puzzles there. But that trip was also where the streak ended, and I only got to day 12, completing the rest of the puzzles in the spring of the following year.
The Monaco Grand Prix from Above
Sometimes it is hard to explain the fascination of watching rich people drive around in circles, and the Monaco Grand Prix is definitely not the best entry into the world of Formula 1. The Monaco GP is an unusually boring race, since the narrow streets of the city make overtaking, the most interesting aspect of racing (apart from maybe crashes), virtually impossible. However, watching a race via TV or live are completely different experiences and when I worked in France last year (Read more) I took the opportunity to watch the Monaco Grand Prix, the most prestigious Grand Prix live.