Tag: advent-of-code

I posted a few weeks ago about learning Go with Advent of Code. I’m a big fan of these puzzles — they’re still hard enough for me that it’s a fun challenge, and trying to do them in a new language really lets me explore whether I’ve learned it well enough for it to get…

I’m a big fan of Advent of Code, it’s taught me about lots of topics. Maybe the most generally useful lesson I’ve taken from it followed the “should I stop and read a book” post I mentioned a few years ago: There’s lots of puzzles where my solution looks like a reasonable approach, works just…

Advent of Code has been a December tradition for me for the last 5 years — I’ve posted before about why I like it so much — and I’m looking forward to 2025’s event starting soon. This year’s format has a few changes, to make it a bit less stressful for the organiser Eric Wastl,…

I tried using Advent of Code to learn TypeScript and it worked very well. I’m much more used to Python and often know what I’d write in that language, so asking “How do I do that in TypeScript?” for some fairly unusual topics has prompted me to learn more about this new language. I’ve written already about…

I wrote last year about how I’m using Advent of Code to learn TypeScript – I often know what I’d like to write in Python, and sometimes the “How do I do that in TypeScript?” question doesn’t have an obvious answer. What was I trying to do? Some puzzles can be solved using memoization: when…

I wrote in “Some things I love about advent of code” about how I was using Advent of Code to help learn TypeScript. I did some of the old puzzles in Python – a language I’m comfortable with – then redid them in this language I’m brand new to. This gave me a chance to…

I’ve mentioned recently how much I enjoy Advent of Code challenges (no spoilers here, don’t worry). One topic I’ve found fascinating is how to write algorithms that find their way around graphs. There’s a lot of history on how people came up with things, and a wide range of problems they can help with (not…

Advent of Code is an advent calendar of coding puzzles – one puzzle appears every day from 1st to 25th December. Each puzzle is in two parts; solving the first part (by writing some code to work out the right answer, and pasting it into the site) gets you a star, and unlocks the second…