When the days are getting shorter and the winter is coming, it is Christmas just around the corner. The holiday season is preceded by the Advent, a period marked by Advent Calendars in all possible areas of human activity, regardless of views, faiths and origins. IT is very much the same and Advent of Code is only one of many such initiatives. The calendar is full of small programming tasks and each day comes with two problems to solve. The main story is built around elves, reindeers, Santa Claus and mysterious star fruit. But the story is only an excuse to challenge developers.
I started coding in Python (in Advent of Code you are free to choose the language, because only the results matter) at the very beginning of December. Sometimes the tasks were really simple for me, sometimes they required long hours of creating algorithms, at least at my level of skills. Everything went well till the 9th day, when I managed to do only one of the tasks, and this was the end of this year’s story for me.
Throughout the coding days, I created 17 interesting algorithms, went over functions regarding strings, input files, multidimensional lists etc., worked out my own methods to debug the code. It was definitely worth the time I spent on the project and I’ll try do get further next year.