Advent Coding Fun

If you’re looking to sharpen up your coding skills over the festive period, here’s two great resources to check out.

First of all, the amazing Advent of Code challenge is back again this year. Every day you get a simple puzzle to solve that can be attempted in any language. Last year I solved them all in both C# (using LINQ and MoreLinq) and F#. I even posted videos of my solutions on my YouTube channel. In the process I became much more fluent in F# and also learned a few new algorithms and regex techniques. So sign up and create yourself an account. It’s a fantastic resource and credit to Eric Wastl for creating it.

Secondly, if you’re interested in learning F#, then do follow the F# Advent Calendar (organized by Sergey Tihon), which features two blog posts each day showing off all kinds of interesting and ingenious uses of F#. This year I’ve volunteered to submit one of the entries, which is a little daunting given the illustrious list of contributors. My favourite F# advent calendar entry last year was an incredible visualization of F# Advent Calendar Contributors by Pierre Irrmann.