Advent of Code

I ran across this site after reading a post from Jeremiah Peschka. It’s an interesting idea, and since I’m trying to improve my development skills in between the rest of my work, I thought this would be fun.

Advent of Code is a site that has a neat idea. A series of puzzles, two a day, that are released each day leading up to Christmas. Since we’re within the 25 days, I’m late (and so are you), but you can join in anytime.  It’s also cool since it’s a fixed font, console looking site.

The idea is that you get requirements for a puzzle, that you must code to solve. The inputs are too long to do by hand, though I suppose if you wanted, you could solve them in Excel. If you solve the first, you get the second.

You can solve them however you’d like. I started doing some in Python, and also then re-solved them in Powershell. It’s mostly to just get some practice coding, and these are good excuses. I have been doing Python first, but I may switch to Powershell first, just to practice. If I get time, I’d like to redo them in C# as well.

If you are looking to do some programming on the side, and practice something, this is a good way to focus on a particular problem and have fun. If you get stuck, there is even a subreddit with people posting questions and answers in a wide variety of languages.