Yes, I do "".join(). Python is not always beautiful.
I began reusing part 1 for part 2, until I realised you cannot reuse the
Counter.most_common, and you need the actual values to be able to se
equal occourences.
I probably lost 5-15 minutes just to dribble with 3 levels of nested
objects. In GMT+1 before coffee, that cost me.
Part 2 was way uglier before some well motivated refactoring. Since all
tests and expected output were in place, refactoring was easy.
Felt a bit slow and rusty. Tooling was not set up properly on the
computer which decreased the flow.
Anyhow, fun first day! Could have been done more pythonic with list sequences, and readability would have increased with more use of sum() and lambdas. But this is not what Advent of Code is about.