Advent of Code 2021

Almost the best part of the year! Since 2015 the advent of code has been a staple in my December rituals. I’ve always worked my way through most of the entries, some years I finished them in time, some others I had family obligations to get to.

However they are a fantastic way to work through some interesting problems, and usually I use them to learn a new language or try something different.

This year was no different, the goals I set out with going into the challenge.

Not build any classes
Use Copilot and see what happens

There’s always a nice story / hidden fun stuff and theme each year. This year the theme was submarine, scanners, sonar and sea life. And overall was quite a great experience. They do a fantastic job of explaining the problems.

Each day 1 new problem, and a bonus step.

How did Copilot do?

It started off quite well, the first 2 days it was able to handle the problems mostly from my comments. But quickly it escalated to lots of errors and it became an exercise in debugging and code-review. Which is fine I guess, since you get what pay for. Overall I do enjoy using Copilot, however I find it most useful in places where you are having to fill out boilerplate code. Or even just writing documentation.

Below are the links to the challenges and the solutions in Python.

Can’t wait to see what they come up with next year.