Last month I took part in another challenge I was unfamiliar with – Advent of Code, created by Eric Wastl. This was another yearly challenge that serves as an advent calendar, but instead of delicious chocolate, you get a 2-part coding challenge every day from 1st – 25th December.
I actually had a lot of fun with this one! It was nice to focus on solving a problem each day without worrying too much about how robust the code you’re writing is – as long as it did the job for that day, it was going to be thrown away the next day anyway – it felt like the code-version of doodling…but with a purpose. 🙂
That isn’t to say that it was easy though; the difficulty definitely increased as the days went on – starting with puzzles which I could easily get the solutions for in half an hour, through to some puzzles taking me several days to solve. I treated those as mini-projects I could return to between some of the easier days and feel like I learnt a lot from them and also from comparing my results to others on the subreddit.
I’m looking forward to taking part in it again next year!
The code for it can be found on GitHub.
Jonathan Mulligan 