Test Your Skills With the Advent of Code 2022
As the end of the year draws nigh, programmers’ thoughts turn to the Advent of Code. Running since 2015, the site celebrates December holidays and coding, with a collection of daily challenges.
How Does it Work?
TheAdvent of Codesite is text-heavy, with green links and an overall presentation that mimics a text editor or terminal session.
Every day, from the 1st of December until the 25th, a new challenge becomes available. Each challenge is clearly described, with examples and any relevant input files available to download. There are two tasks per challenge.
Each task will ask you to enter a final answer, which will be something your program should have calculated. You can use any language you want to complete the task. In theory, you can work out some solutions by hand, but this will usually be laborious—and where’s the fun in that, anyway?
How Do You Take Part?
What Are the Challenges Like?
The challenges start simple and get more difficult as the month progresses. This year’s first task is simply to add some groups of numbers from a text file and work out the largest total.
A task might seem straightforward to begin with, and you can ‘brute-force’ many, especially the easy ones. However, because the challenge lets you use any language, and only asks for a final answer, you can get whatever you want out of it. For example, you might want to use the series in one of these ways:
All the challenges are part of a wider theme, typically relating to Christmas. This year’s story is about Santa’s elves gathering fruit to sustain them during their busiest work period.
Learn by Challenging Yourself and Having Fun
The web is full of programming games and challenges you can take part in. They may not always produce practical results, but they offer a fun break from day-to-day work. And interesting tasks are often easier to see through than mundane ones.
Online programming contests can offer job breakthroughs or simple cash rewards. Take your pick from these coding challenges.
OneDrive is one of the best, but it has a catch.
You can’t call this offline, Notion.
Free AI tools are legitimately powerful; you just need to know how to stack them.
Revolutionize your driving experience with these game-changing CarPlay additions.
These plugins will make you wonder why you used Photoshop in the first place.
