What is Advent Of Code?
Firstly, I should say that if you haven’t heard of Advent Of Code - first of all, are you living under a rock? In all seriousness, I wanted to take the time to share my thoughts going through Advent Of Code 2022 as a designer first and foremost.
Advent Of Code is a yearly coding event in which each day leading up to Christmas (starting from the 1st), a new coding challenge opens up every day. The challenges can range from easy to hard and always come in two parts. In part one, you’re always trying to take in parsing an input and writing an algorithm, whereas in part 2 you always have to build upon your algorithm in a more challenging way. This can result in a walk in the park or having to rebuild your entire solution from scratch.
So far, so good
Days 1 through 6 went very well for me, I blitzed through most questions in the earlier days but started to struggle around day 5 with the crazy input you had to parse. Coming up to day 10, I really started to struggle with some of the more math and algorithmic problems. As someone who every day at their job thinks more in the creative mindset, sometimes I come up with too clever of a solution, when the answer is much simpler.
Having been presented with problems that challenged me in ways I never thought, I’ve learned so much in the past 16 days about algorithms, how to parse complicated input, and even re-discovering my GCSE (UK high school grades) math skills which I thought had been lost to time but managed to get me an A grade.
Reaching the point of no return
Days 14/15 were a real challenge for me, sometimes I had to use other people’s solutions to find the answers and then work backwards through their solution in order to understand how to solve problems like these. When I first started, I had no idea how to get the input into my code, now I can quickly work out what data structures would be best for the problem at hand.
And, that is to say, you shouldn’t feel any shame if you had to look up the solution to the problem online, because that’s how we learn and it’s how I originally learned to code in JavaScript a few years ago.
It has taught me so much of the fundamentals of code that I hadn’t picked up when I first started self-teaching myself code and has opened my eyes to how easy some of the more math parts of coding are. That’s finally an excuse to do some data visualization side projects as the math that goes into some of those visualisations is insane but has been an area I’ve wished to get into for years as it perfectly aligns my creative design and coding skills.
Advent Of Code has been a wonderful event to take part in, even if half of the days were solved by myself. It’s reinvigorated my love of code and data and even has me finally wanting to get round to learning D3. A library I’ve been wanting to learn for years.
If you haven’t had the chance to take part in this year’s Advent Of Code, I highly recommend you do so, or you can keep an eye on my Github repo for my progress so far.