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AdventOfCode 2018 by Fullofkittens 12/16/2018, 6:40pm PST https://adventofcode.com/ This has apparently been going on for a couple of years now: this guy posts a new coding puzzle every night in December leading up to Christmas. Each puzzle is some flavor text about how you need to travel through time to save Christmas by doing stuff like sneaking into a secret lab where they're developing Santa's suit, and then you have to write an algorithm that will parse through some giant amount of data and answer a question like "given these 5000 visitor logs, which guard falls asleep the most often and at what moment?" and every night has a two part puzzle where you can earn two gold stars for solving both parts. It is technically a competition but you can only get points if you can be in the first 100 people to submit an answer every night (and thousands of people do the puzzle every day. The puzzles range from "really stupid easy" (Day 1) to "too hard for FoK to get both points without phoning a friend." (Day 6). Solving a puzzle yourself feels really great: you get your last test to pass, your code gives you the answer, you paste it in the form, it tells you you did a good job and earned a gold star. ^____^ The challenges are language-agnostic (You can use Pascal if you want!) and most people use it as an opportunity to learn new stuff. (This year I am using it to learn the Jetbrains C# IDE.) It's really instructive to go and look at other people's solutions once you're done, both to learn new language features and also to see that wow, other people sure like jamming a lot of stuff in one method. This is, afaik, the work of one guy. If so it must be a monumental amount of work, kudos to him.

AdventOfCode 2018 by Fullofkittens 12/16/2018, 6:40pm PST