How to improve your programming puzzle skill? Let’s play Advent of Code

Daniel Quek
2 min readDec 12, 2020

Have you run out of puzzles to solve recently? How about completing this yearly affair puzzle — Advent of Code?

What is Advent of Code?

Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as a speed contest, interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other. The puzzles are all developed by this guy Eric Wastl.

I do not know programming

You don’t need a computer science background to participate — just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Nor do you need a fancy computer; every problem has a solution that completes in at most 15 seconds on ten-year-old hardware.

Where do I start?

Head over to https://adventofcode.com to start solving the puzzles. As at the time of writing, we are at Day 12 of 2020. Stuck somewhere? Don’t worry, i have included the solutions by the top players in the leaderboard for your reference as well!

Current Leaderboard as at 12 Dec 2020

Solutions from the top leaderboard players

  1. betaveros
  2. ecnerwala
  3. Robert Xiao
  4. nthistle
  5. Sophie Alpert
  6. tckmn
  7. arknave
  8. leijurv
  9. m-schm
  10. mcpower
  11. Martin Camacho
  12. George Hotz

My solution

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