My boyfriend loves Advent calendars. He’s got them all wrapped up, ready to hand out Friday. I have one for him, too.
And it just occurred to me today that something else happens on Advent. Advent of Code. 25 days of programming problems that test your skill and imagination.
Two years back, I started writing visualizations for some of the puzzles in PyGame. I used the code I wrote for those as the basis for my 7DRL game entry the next March… which didn’t work out so well, as PyGame really didn’t package well for me. Almost nobody was able to play it.
Last year, I wrote several games for the first couple of weeks of puzzles, before it became too hard to both solve the puzzle and also write a game around it. I did all of those in Pico-8. I think I have one or two of them up on my Games page at itch.io. They aren’t much, but at least they are playable.
This year… well, of course, I will be writing the solutions in Python. I wrote them in both Python and Java 17 last year as a way to get acquainted with a later version of Java than we were using at work at the time. I took that knowledge back to work and spearheaded the Java upgrade last spring. A couple of years back, I planned to use Clojure to solve the puzzles, but I never did get comfortable enough with that language to make it useful.
This year, the AoC organizer has asked us not to use AI solutions to get on the global leaderboard. No danger of that here. Puzzles unlock at midnight, local time, and I need to be in bed, not programming. Would I solve them with AI? Well, I do use Github Copilot (which we now can use at work as well), but I haven’t seen that spit out solutions to puzzles. And anyway, the fun, for me, is that instant where the correct solution suddenly makes sense. Then I post my solution to Reddit and look at what everyone else has done. It’s wonderful.
So for most of the month of December… get ready to hear about my coding adventures in Santa land. And if you’re participating, I’d love to read about your adventures as well.
When I asked Midjourney for an illustration of Python programming, Christmas, and the Advent of Code competition, it really wanted to focus on pythons. As I asked for variants, the pythons became larger and more numerous and started to mutate.
I kinda like that this particular one looks like Lofi Girl hard at work.
Looking forward to once again being rather awed by your coding ability! I looked at one puzzle from that program once and got a headache, so went back to playing video games in my spare time. 🙂
I love AoC until the hard puzzles start, and then I want to play video games too.
I’m planning to try starting out in Haskell… a language I don’t know. I’ve been studying it all morning in preparation.