I spontaneously decided to give Advent of Code a shot this year, and for Day 1 of Advent of Code 2024 ("Historian Hysteria"), I walked through my full Python approach for both parts of the puzzle. The story setup is this fun mix of math and mystery: a chief historian employed by Santa goes missing, and we’re comparing two lists of location IDs to help the elves figure out where he might have gone. I can’t promise I’ll post every single day because I’m juggling a demanding full-time job (and a year-end deadline), but I’m doing my best to keep filming and sharing my solutions. For Part 1, I read the input into two lists, sorted both lists, paired smallest-to-smallest, and summed the absolute differences to get the total distance. My final answer for that part was 2285373. For Part 2, I computed a similarity score by building a hashmap of number occurrences in the second list, then iterating through the first list and summing each number multiplied by its count in list two (e.g., if 3 appears three times, it contributes 9). That gave me 21142653, and it was also correct. If you’re participating, I’d genuinely love to hear how you approached it too.