Advent of Code 2017

I love adventofcode. It’s definitely something I look forward to (with some apprehension!) each December. Last year I was playing around with Elixir and did the solutions in that. This year I was (am) trying to get a little bit better at JavaScript, so, that was the language I chose.

What is Advent of code? Well, it’s a series of smallish programming puzzles. There are 25 released during advent (one each day). Each day has 2 parts, an easier and then harder. The second part is always related to the first, but, just with a twist: you might have to scale it up, rework it etc. Also, they have fun little stories around them. This year Santa’s microprocessor had stalled trying to create the huge naughty & nice list.. so, we were beamed into the computer and had to try fix it. Fun times.

I’m not sure my JavaScript actaully improved all that much, a bit I’m sure. I did get somewhat lazy towards the end and was just trying to get the (damn things!) completed rather than do them properly. Still, I got there in the end. I did look for hints on, I think, 2 occasions. I probably would have got there in the end, but, some of these problems are way outside any kind of “normal” programming I do.

I will go back and look at other peoples’ nicer solutions and learn a bit there. If you’re interested, my solutions are on GitHub.

Anyway, thanks heaps to Eric Wastl for running it again this year, it was lots of fun.

via GIPHY

Feedback

One comment on “Advent of Code 2017

  1. Avatar for Patrick

    Matt MacPherson

    Hey Patrick, if you like Advent of Code, you would probably also like https://edabit.com/explore – It’s like Duolingo for learning to code.

Leave a Reply