The Advent of Code

The lovely Scott Bilas recently joined our team at work (working on an unannounced project) and announced that he likes to do an annual programming challenge, called Advent of Code inviting anybody on the team to join him on it. I had heard of it but never participated.

It’s a cute premise; you’re given a small set of example data in text, with the result for that data. You’re asked to write an algorithm in whatever language you like, that will solve the problem laid out in the Christmas-themed dilemma. Then there’ll be a link to the real data, which will be impossibly huge, and a box to enter your answer. You write your code, test against the small set of data, then run the same code against the big set of data, and boom – you should* have your answer.

Once you get that correct, there’ll be a twist, a second part that puts a wrinkle on it

My day job in 2025 hasn’t involved much coding, so I thought I’d give it a go – I’ll try to chronicle my efforts here as best I can! I’ll also try to share some snippets.

I’ve set up a public repository here.