Into the Advent-ure of Code 2022
This was the first time I attended the global coding hackathon-like fun event, the Advent of Code 2022. Being an Android developer using Kotlin, I’ve been following the Kotlin updates on Jetbrains blog posts, and this year, Jetbrains happens to be the key sponsor for the event and they have provided a sample GitHub repo for quick-starting with kotlin, and provided some tips.
I also joined their Slack channel to see what others are up to. And then it started. It was an amazing experience. The problems started simple enough but requires some thinking to do, and then day after day, it scaled slowly to increasingly difficult problems (maybe I felt it like that). Each time you solve a problem and goes to the slack channel, you would find various insightful perspectives, reading the other people’s solutions and going through their github repos.
It even inspired me to write similar kind of problems for the colleagues in my office, to improve their kotlin skills. I have greatly improved upon my Kotlin knowledge, thanks to my AOC peers. You get to know the idiomatic kotlin being used properly in various situations. I’ve even started using the collection framework functions (map, filter etc) which was kind of an enlightment for me.
I’m still stuck at day 12, it’s a maze solving question. But it did sparked an interest in me to learn about graph theory and BFS, DFS etc. I hope to complete the 25 days problems soon.
Visit the official AOC website
Have you not tried AOC yet? Sign up, choose a language of your choice and gear up for an amazing coding journey.
