Yesterday I discovered Advent of Code following an article in The Register. While I’m disappointed to discover I’ve missed it for the past few years, I’m quite excited to be taking part this year. This morning I woke up with excitement over what puzzle today’s advent calendar would have, which is the first time I’ve felt like that over an advent calendar in quite a few years now!

The first two days of puzzles have been fairly straight-forward, solvable in about 10-20 lines of code, and I’ve done all of them so far with about 10 minutes of effort. Given the puzzles are released at 00:00 EST (which is 05:00 for me!), I don’t have a hope of getting onto the leaderboards. As such, I’m playing to “save Christmas” and get all fifty stars.

If you’ve got an interest in programming and problem-solving, it’s something I’d highly recommend you give a go! My language of choice here is C# running on .NET 5, but you can use whatever language you want.

If you want, you can see my solutions at https://github.com/stwalkerster/advent-of-code. At the moment, I’m not publishing my solutions for that day’s puzzle until later in the day, but I make no guarantee to keep that up as the month progresses.

… I was thinking of doing a reskin of this site at some point, and I was thinking of a dark theme. Having recently done a ton of work on Helpmebot’s web frontend to turn it into something modern and actually useful (rather than the half-implemented MediaWiki extension it was), I’ve got my eyes set on doing some web design projects again.