Advent of Code 2022

…with Servian

3 min readNov 25, 2022

Drive of coding — Photo by Roman Synkevych 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

What is Advent of Code?

With its advent in 2015, Advent of Code is a series of programming puzzles that come out every day for 25 days leading up to Christmas. Every day, starting 1st of December, a puzzle comes out at midnight Eastern Standard Time or UTC-5. If you’re in New Zealand, this will be 6pm.

Each puzzle has 2 parts. The first part is essentially a checkpoint. The second part emulates a change in requirement, much like how user requirements change during a project.

Who solves these puzzles?

As of 2021 more that 700k people have been involved. Advent of Code is where avid coders, coding enthusiasts and code curious people come together every year. It has a subreddit, numerous blogs, YouTube videos where people motivate, challenge and learn from each other.

Who creates the puzzles?

Eric Wastl. This person designs all of these puzzle and has them peer reviewed before releasing them. Find out their own account of what got them started on this and what goes on behind the scenes. It’s also an awesome video of the challenges involved in scaling up a personal project. There is a great deal of thought, care and effort put into making these puzzles which is covered in this part of the video.

How do I get started?

Sign up to www.adventofcode.com and join Servian Private Leaderboard if you so wish (please find the steps and screenshots below to help with that). Solve some puzzles from 2020, 2021 if you are reading this before 1st of December 2022. Python is a popular choice, but people have solved puzzles in assembly code, Excel and graph papers. Yes, physical graph papers.