Every now and then, I am faced with a problem that I have not faced before and I set out to try to solve it using Bash, preferably as a one-liner. Often, it's more about genomics tools. This page chronicles the tasks I've faced and the code that I wrote to solve them. Some may be short, while some may deserve a longer piece, but all of them helped me learn some new things, and I hope you do too. As I write these, I know that some of them might have more elegant or faster solutions. If you think you know one, let me know!
I've been meaning to get into Rust and THIS. IS. IT. I'll be attempting to solve the problems from this year's Advent of Code in Rust, with the hope that a practical exposure to the language would help get better at it. Rust has a lot of pros that have been documented many times by many people - this and this are some examples. Given my full time workload as a grad student, my goal was to make it to a week of Advent, and anything beyond that is a bonus. I have been coding in Python since I was thirteen - more than half of my life - back when print "Hello World" was just as valid as print("Hello World"). As a result, Rust did feel a bit strange but it's been fun. I'd set a target of completing at least one week of Advent and I've already gotten past that so I'm well chuffed with my progress so far. I decided to stop at Day 16 as I got busy with my travels but it has been a great learning experience. Since my main goal was to learn the language rather than make the leaderboard or come up with super low execution times, i often opted for brute force solutions where I could have used dynamic programming. I think maybe that's something to aim for in next year's edition! Check out my solutions for each of the days below.