My old friend Simon Breslav pointed me to Advent of Code a week or more ago, but at first I was hesitant. Where would I find the time to tackle a daily coding challenge that wasn’t related to work? Would I even be up to the challenge, given the fact I’m not coding full-time and may not be up-to-date with the latest techniques?
Here’s a speech by the creator of Advent of Code, Eric Wastl, where he talks about the origins of AoC from back in 2015, and how it’s gone from strength to strength since:
Anyway, come Friday evening I said to myself “go on, let’s see if I can catch up with this year’s event” and I immediately became hooked. I started off in Excel – easing my way into it – as much as anything to see at which point I’d hit the wall on needing a more mature coding environment: it turns out the answer is Day 4, which needed a slightly more complex data structure, and so I switched to JavaScript. That’s just my own choice, though: you could basically choose…