I love advent of code. It’s a wonderful website of programming challenges that a programmer (Eric Wastl) has been running for the last couple of years. It’s all Christmassy themed, this year:
Santa’s sleigh uses a very high-precision clock to guide its movements, and the clock’s oscillator is regulated by stars. Unfortunately, the stars have been stolen… by the Easter Bunny. To save Christmas, Santa needs you to retrieve all fifty stars by December 25th.
I chose to do the challenges this year in Elixir which is a language I’ve been playing around with for the last few months. Having the coding challenges has been a great way to practice different features, and to see how other more experienced programmers do things. I also put all of my code for the last few years on my GitHub repository. There was quite a lot of maze-solving this year. I made a little video of my (brute force) algorithm solving day 13:
Anyway, while I didn’t actually make it in time to save Christmas, I did solve all the puzzles (some by luck ;) by the end of the year. I had a great time doing the puzzles though – many thanks to Eric for all his hard work!
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