The temptation to start a competative private leader board will be great, just for the mentioned reason. I have a reference my scores in my CV. The competative part of AoC is one of the things that I find attractive and also has taught me some valuable lessons about coding, like taking some time to review the code the first time before submitting. I experienced several times that I spend of time to debug a small bug due to a minor error, that I could have caught had I spend some time reviewing. Especially with the first puzzles, I try to get it right the fitst time with respect to compiling and execution.
I will search for a pure C private group to join that only allows a small library for things like reading the input as an array of strings.
On your CV ? Has any recruiter or hiring manager ever commented on it, or said the mention gave you an advantage ?
No, but I don't care. I guess that most hiring managers do not know what AoC is.
Next week, I will be 64, and I am no longer searching for a full time job. In the past decade I only worked for 24 or 30 hours per week. I am financial independent and plan to only work freelance if there is some opportunity. Currently, I am not actively searching for a job.
I have created a private leaderboard which you can join with `1563228-d419ba6d.`
The basic rule is: you are only allowed to use code you wrote yourself. That does include code you wrote before the start of the contest, for example, standard functions you wrote for earlier AoC editions.