Environment automation over Advent of Code

Advent of Code

The Advent of Code (AoC) is a programming competition organized by Eric Wastl. It’s an advent calendar where every day he releases a new challenge rooted in a Christmas theme. In a few words, a challenge involves going through an interesting description.

A challenge is broken down into two parts. Part 1 is a smaller-scoped problem compared to part 2, or part 2 will add a twist to what you had to do in part 1. To avoid issues, we can’t just submit the same answer for everyone. So each person gets their own input file containing the data to leverage as you try to solve the daily challenge.

I’ve always found that using platforms like LeetCode or CodeWars was an excellent place for me to focus on my code mastery. On top of that, there’s a great community on Reddit working on these. Do not hesitate to reach out if you need help.

Solving daily challenges < 1 second with Elixir.

Since I’ve been working with Elixir @ Giverny Capital, I decided to use Elixir again this year. Based on a post that I read – Solving Advent of Code in Under a Second – I’ve decided to follow along a similar mindset. My goals are to solve challenges, have fun, and deepen my Elixir skills.

Enhancing my development setup

Last year, I created a repository as a space to solve AoC challenges. There were a few things that I didn’t enjoy doing because I’m never fond of redundant steps, such as:

Fetching the input challenge
Creating my source file with the proper structure
Creating my test file with the proper structure
Measuring time to complete a given part

After watching Automating Advent of Code Setup with Igniter, I decided to use my strengths and work on automation and DevEx. So, I worked with Claude a bit before the AoC started in November to enhance my developer experience within the repository. I’m not against using AI to make ourselves better engineers. I’m not (yet) using Claude Code, instead: