Last year I discovered by chance a code competition that happens in the month of December: The Advent of Code. This event consists of small puzzles release every day of December, up to the 25th. Which amounts to 25 problems! (I can do math).
Last year I tried doing some on Bash, and latter switched to Julia, but never got to finish them. This year I decided to use Julia, because I want to test it for these general problems. Some problems are very hard, and I want to have the packages at my disposal.
There is a leaderboard, which revolves around the first 100 solvers for each day. Most problems are solved in the first 5 minutes of its release, and the 100th place is usually less than 15 minutes. The best I got was 30 minutes, getting the 135th position and zero points. However, I’m usually not trying to get there because the problems are release at 3am for me (Brazil), and by that time I’m usually sleeping.
This year I’m trying to follow more closely the dates, managed to solve one by day until a gigantic workload halted my progress for a week. Yesterday I returned to these problems and solved the missing ones up until now.
If you like coding, you should give it a try. My code for this year is available at GitHub, but only open it if you decided not to play. Be warned that most of my answers were poorly written because I still want to do it fast, and am not worried about cleaning of efficiency.
Happy new year, holidays, and coding.