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From the About page: "Advent of Code [created by Eric Wastl - JSc] is a series of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels. They are self-contain
by jschulenklopper 10y ago
From the About page: "Advent of Code [created by Eric Wastl - JSc] is a series of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels. They are self-contained and are just as appropriate for an expert who wants to stay sharp as they are for a beginner who is just learning to code. Each puzzle calls upon different skills and has two parts that build on a theme."
I've had great fun with Advent of Code last year, competing with a group of friends and colleagues. You can set up a private leaderboard for a group, and watch the progress of the participants.
It can be addicting though. If you attend some social event (dinner, party, sports game) you fear that your colleagues are passing you on the leaderboard.
- jschulenklopper 10y agoOh, and in the beginning of January, after AoC completed, we hosted a knowledge-exchange session - our company organizes a mini-conference every two weeks, attended by all colleagues. The "Show me the code"-session was an opportunity to share solutions, approaches, tactics that didn't work, and creative discoveries. Entertaining and interesting!
- jschulenklopper 10y agoA little more explanation on the challenges themselves: The challenges (at least: the ones in the 2015 edition) are stories in a Christmas setting. The American version of that, so focussing on some question/problem that Santa Claus has: how to distribute packages on a sleigh, how many miles to travel between some cities, how many packages to distribute according to some rule for brave kids, how much paper and ribbon does it take to wrap a set of presents. The programs that you write (if you don't want to solve it by mathematical/brain powers) focus on things like sorting, combinations, counting, grids, trees, graphs, other simple data structures around some fairly basic logic. Nothing too advanced, although sometimes you need to deploy some smart memoization trick (and take the complexity into account, O(log n) is better than O(n!) ) to push the execution time down. You want an answer before Christmas, not before when our Sun expands into a Red Giant. The programs typically are between 5 and 50 lines of code.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI still haven't beaten it, because I suck :-(. Speaking of which, anybody know any good resources for learning algorithms and datastructures, so I can actually know this stuff?