The meetup was part of the Nyköping Developers meetup group, who meets biweekly to geek and talk developing topics. It’s a really great way to get away from the current projects for a few hours.

Advent of Code is a yearly Advent calendar event (and optional competition), where you every day get a new programming puzzle. It’s not only for people with a computer science background, but also for people with just some basic programming knowledge and problem solving skills.

You could brute force your way through the puzzles

The puzzles are not only “puzzles”, but they are written as stories, which also are part of a bigger main story. Respect to the creators for this, I can only guess how many hours they have put into the project.

You could brute force your way through the puzzles, and I heard someone really did early on by just testing directly in the answer fields. Now they have safe guards against it.

The meetup mission was to get together and solve some of the current puzzles. I had never participated in Advent of Code before, but I was really close last year.

Each day has a two part puzzle, which are also related (so far). The second part is likely to add another layer of complexity to the first puzzle.

Today I solved the first two days’ puzzles. It went pretty well, I think. I’m not really used to this type of problem — It’s not really what I do in my work.

What I really liked these puzzles is the programming nature of them. What I usually do in my work is “just” mostly rendering components and transforming collections into another maintainable structure, which then are rendered as components. It’s of course something I enjoy doing, but sometimes it’s fun to just solve problems.

My puzzle solutions are shared on GitHub, if someone is interested.