Avent of Code 2020

AdeventOfCode.com is a site that has, for many years, offered an incredibly fun and challenging set of puzzles during the month of December. If you are an aspiring software engineer or a seasoned pro, this site is for you!

The site has a simple new challenge for each day of December leading up to the 25th. There are actually two related challenges per day that you can earn stars for, and then if you earn the required 50 stars you will get some positive feedback and the end of the story.

Educational Value

The site is fun and game like, but the puzzles are varied and very serious. Some are solvable with a calculator and some math, while others require brute force solutions, and every year they change. The value to the person playing the game is both practice with problem solving and coding.

The practice is problem-solving is incredibly valuable. Software engineers often have to solve problems that do not look anything like anything that they have been previously taught to do, and many of the problems are domain-specific. With this site, you get 25-50 puzzles that have all the information that you need to solve them, are vetted by a community, and are completely free!

Also, if you are a junior developer or someone who is currently or might be looking for a new position in the future, you should share your work on GitHub, or your chosen source code management platform. It might be a great topic to discuss in an interview.

Fun!

It’s not all work! You also have fun reading the story and there is a lot of excitement when you solve the problem and your answer is accepted by the site. This bump in serotonin is what makes software engineering fun in my opinion. You toil endlessly until you are able to solve the problem and then it can be quite exciting when it finally happens.

Also the puzzles do occasionally build on one another, so if the stars are not enough to keep you motivated, knowing the the algorithms you use might help you later could keep you going.

It’s also fun to do it with friends or co-workers. If you have other people who like problem-solving and writing software, join up and try to share or compete with one another. There are some puzzles that are quite hard, and some guidance can never hurt. There is also a rich forum that is linked on the site if you run into trouble.

Good Luck!

As a final note, it’s a great idea to set a calendar invite for yourself for next November 30th to remind you to do the advent of code for next year.