My polyglot Advent of Code

At Basecamp we have an internal project called “Your proudest moments”. My colleague Dan set it up so that people at Basecamp could share anything we’re proud of. So far people have shared impressive, really feel-good accomplishments, such as performing complicated house renovations without professional help, writing books, or taking their parents on an unforgettable vacation.

This post comes from my first contribution to this project. As I told them, it went to “Your proudest moments” because we don’t have a “Your most useless and pointless self-inflicted programming hours” project, that would have been the best fit. Still, this quite a ridiculous thing to do made me super proud, and I also had a lot of fun doing it.

[image error]All the 50 stars!

Advent of Code is an advent calendar of programming puzzles that’s been happening since 2015, made by Eric Wastl. Every day from 1st to 25th December a new puzzle with 2 parts gets released and for each part solved you get a star. The goal is to collect all 50 stars to save Christmas. All the problems follow a story normally involving the space, a spaceship, elves, reindeers and Santa. The difficulty increases as the days pass. First ones are simpler, but then they start getting complicated and laborious. Some of them are pretty tricky! They aren’t necessarily super hard algorithmically, binary search, BFS, Dijkstra, Floyd–Warshall, A*… might be all you need but I can easily take several hours to finish each one. This year there was also a bit of modular arithmetic that I loved and a little bit of trigonometry. The problems are quite amazing. This year for example included things like a Pong game in Intcode, a made-up assembly language (you had to program the joystick movements and feed them to the program) and a text-based adventure game in Intcode as well. It’s seriously cool.

the quality and thought behind the problems in AoC is really outstanding, you can feel the amount of work and dedication behind their preparation, and the result is challenging, engaging, and fun (CAVEAT: marriages may be harmed) https://t.co/CWnSgfTsTh

— Xavier Noria (@fxn) December 12, 2019

I’ve done it in 2016, 2017 and 2018, the first time in Ruby, then the last 2 years in Elixir. I never finish on the 25th December because for me it’s impossible to work, take care of life stuff and also spend several hours programming these puzzles every day