I love December. Christmas, New Year, a week or 2 holidays, a look back at the year’s achievements and… AdventOfCode. AdventOfCode is an annual programming challenge consisting of puzzles that can be solved in any programming language. The event is aimed at people with different levels of programming skills and offers an opportunity to improve our skills and learn new techniques. Challenges are launched daily during the month of December until the 25th, at Christmas. There are always 2 problems and for each one solved you get a star.

I’ll be honest and say that until 2022 I solved some challenges but I was never consistent. This year I decided to take it seriously and by the 8th I had collected all 16 stars. And as I said above, I’m seeing it as a learning opportunity: every problem has an example with a solution, so here I am doing TDD, the classic red-green-refactor cycle; every day you download a text file as input and solve for each of the stars, so here I am with an automated template in node that generates a common structure of files and folders; Problems can be solved in several ways, so here I am calculating the performance of my solution and optimising; I’m publishing my answers day by day, so here I am commenting on my code so that my intentions are clear; As there is one issue per day, so here I am looking at each day as a release, I automated the generation of releases on Github using release-please.

My strategy every day has been the most naive, I try to solve everything by brute force. When it takes too long, I stop and think of something better. If it’s acceptable (well, it’s quite subjective here, anything running in less than 3 minutes, ok), I send the answers and at the end of the day I revisit the problem and reflect on whether there’s a better way to do it. For example, one day it was necessary to calculate paths using a map with instructions. My first approach was with a loop, after solving it I realised that I could use the least common multiple of the different paths. Nice!

Let’s see if I can keep up with the issues, it’s been a lot of fun, I highly recommend it!