Advent of Code 2022 — A Challenge a Day til Christmas
It’s almost christmas time and therefore a tradition of mine has started today: Advent of Code.
This annual event hosted in December provides daily, christmas themed challenges that you can solve with any programming language of your choice. You just have to find the right solutions.
The puzzles are designed to require no complicated computer science background to solve them. Some knowledge in any programming language and some skills in puzzle solving should get you pretty far already. But beware, the puzzles will get more difficult over time!
A Puzzle a Day keeps the Rust Away
Each day two new puzzles are made public and for each solved puzzle you are rewarded with a star. Will you be able to collect all 50 of them?
Apart from the challenge to get the solution right, people also compete against each other for a top spot in the leaderboard. The fastest 100 people to solve a puzzle are additionally awarded points and a chance to appear in the ranking.
Advent of Kotlin
Since many of us at arconsis are big fans of Kotlin, it’s an obvious choice to solve these puzzles with. Luckily, JetBrains is sponsoring this event for the 2nd year already and makes it easy for people to participate in Advent of Code. Check out their blog post to read more about the event and some additional community events like a Kotlin specific leaderboard, livestreams or tips and tricks to get started. If you are planning on using GitHub you can even use their pre-made project template which will automatically fork and prepare a basic project structure. So no setup needed, directly jump to the coding part!
And if that wasn’t enough, there are even some prizes to win if you make your repository with the solutions public.
Let’s get Started!
I myself have already completed today’s puzzle. I like to start with it first thing in the morning with a nice cup of coffee to begin the working day. I guess some could see it as a “warmup” for the regular working day?
In any case, I am looking forward to the next 24 challenging days and wish all of you happy coding!
