Advent of Code

I’ve really been enjoying working my way through the code challenges at http://adventofcode.com/.

My solutions are here: https://github.com/andyvanee/adventofcode

I’m now on day 8, and the examples have ranged from very easy to pretty involved, but none have been devilishly complicated or tricky.

Here’s my favorite part:

Each exercise has a second step, which is only visible after solving step 1. Knowing that you will have to refactor or extend deal the code you wrote in step one is much more like real-world coding.

I think this kind of exercise is important at any level of programming experience. For me, it was some confirmation that I actually have made progress in my code. I’m sure my solutions much more modular and well tested than I would have produced a few years ago.

https://github.com/andyvanee/adventofcode/blob/master/spec/fire_hazard_spec.rb

Day 7 was a highlight for me, as I’ve never actually written a parser/evaluator for a custom minilanguage. I’ve read the theory a few times, and had some experience with ad-hoc embedded DSL’s, but this was my first end-to-end implementation of something like this. My solution is in the BT module here:

https://github.com/andyvanee/adventofcode/tree/master/lib

Although it could use some cleanup and documentation about what’s actually going on, I was pretty happy with the performance and functionality - especially with the addition of memoization of partial results here: https://github.com/andyvanee/adventofcode/blob/master/lib/bt/evaluator.rb

A big thumbs up to http://was.tl/ for this project!