Advent of Code 2022

My Advent of Code Calendar at the finish - 32 gold stars collected, 2 better than last year 🙌

After being introduced to the annual coding festival of Advent of Code last year, I was already looking forward to the next one. I helped organise the company-wide efforts to promote the event, and administered the leaderboard for our Newcastle office.

The daily puzzles are released at UTC-5, that’s 5:00am U.K. time, and I remember thinking why on Earth would anyone want to get up that early to start solving programming puzzles…

Well, as the 1st of December 2022 drew near, the bug caught me and before I knew it my alarm was set for 4:45am, giving me enough time to roll out of bed, make a coffee, and be ready for the puzzle as soon as it was available.

Day 8 of 2022 while travelling for work - this was my early morning set-up

It was addictive, challenging, and increasingly frustrating… I attempted every new puzzle every day, and towards the end the stars became ellusive in the little over 2 hours I had before starting work.

Thanks once again to the creator, Eric Wastl - see you for 2023 🤓