July, 2020

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Coding Challenges

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020

There are two challenges that really stand out as my favorites right now. There is the https://www.adventofcode.com site. This challenge occurs once a year from Dec 1st – Dec 25th. There are two puzzles a day, except possibly only one on the last day as a reward. It depends on the year. These have been going on since 2015, and you can go back and solve previous years problems for practice.

The Advent of Code challenges tend to have a lot of searching and depending on the year, themes that are used for many of the problems. For example, in 2019, there was the them of the intcode computer to run software based on a predefined message that each user gets as a customer data input. There tends to be a lot of Breadth-First-Search and Depth-First-Search algorithms used in the problems. Brush up on those in whatever language you choose to use.

The second challenge I have really grown to like is https://www.projecteuler.net. If the name doesn’t give it away, these are more math oriented problems. These are really fun, and the first fifty or so problems are not too difficult. Most answers and hints for the first 100 problems can be found online, but it is well worth trying to work these out yourself. So far, I’ve spent three days on a really simple problem. I did look at a solution, but didn’t like it. I finally found the problem. I had to re-read the problem to find that I was not counting correctly. It is the little things that get you.

The language you pick really doesn’t matter. I’d pick one that you want to get better at that you will continue to use, but that is just me. These puzzles are great fun!