A famous advent project

Excerpt

Coding challenges in December might be tricky.

If you like to code you need to have a look into the project Advent of Code.

Since many years each day in december before christmas a new challenge is published to be solved by coding - sometimes by including some thinking.

This year they have wrapped their puzzle challenges into a story about Elves in a Submarine... :). The challenges usually require some tricky computing that result a number that you have to insert to be verified. When correct you get a gold star. There are 2 stars per day possible.

Try out a interactive programming tool

I did some using an approach that is well known to the friends coding in Python: Jupyter Notebooks.

It is a document based approach that combines markdown documentation and interactive inline coding.

In VSCode there is quiet good support for notebooks even on other languages: https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels. It is already an impressive list and tslab is providing support for TypeScript and JavaScript.

Installation is quiet easy by installing using npm: npm install -g tslab and tslab install.

You may find ideal for verifying code snippets but also for solving these challenges.

Bonus: GitHub shows the files in a nice formatting: https://github.com/yunabe/tslab-examples/blob/master/notebooks/getting_started.ipynb

Happy coding.

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