I'm super excited for this, but also scared. These little puzzles are such a dopamine hit that I can't really be productive until I have that day solved. As the month progresses and the problems get harder, more and more of my time is consumed. Wondering if I should try to wake up early to start before work or just block the website on my work computers.
As someone who codes basically only when AoC is around, and can solve like 70-80% of the puzzles, I am constantly wondering if this skill would be enough to get a job in the industry.
Obviously stuff like Git would still needed to be learned, but purely using AoC as a Benchmark of problem solving through using code, would that be enough?
Solving 70-80% of puzzles shows you are a good (very good?) small scale problem solver. A quick pursue of your code would probably also demonstrate sufficient proficiency in your language of choice.
As a hiring manager, residual concerns that I would try to get a handle of in interview would be:
* How do you deal with solving problems in larger systems, particularly in code you did not design, write, or perhaps even knew existed up to the point of discovering a problem
Being able to solve 80% of AoC is nothing to sneeze at. There are plenty of roles that are open to you. You should start applying to jobs that interest you.
If you have no other experience you can point to, I'd take one or two of last year's AoC puzzles you solved and write a short write-up on how you solved it. Explain the problem, explain why it's hard (it's a challenge after all), talk about failed attempts (this is important), and talk about how you solved it.
I'd include this with your resume or cover letter.
Remember, the goal is to get to the next stage of the interview process - so you want to give them something to signal you're worth interviewing. AoC (or open source work) gives the interviewer something to ask about.
Honestly, AoC style problems are pretty disconnected from day to day software engineering for most people. But being pretty good at them is absolutely not a bad thing. I wouldn’t fret about learning git though. As a new member of a team, people would get you up to speed on the basics of their workflow, and I wouldn’t want to spend time becoming a git wizard and then end up having to use a proprietary wrapper around perforce unless you truly love saying Merkle tree.
I'll probably use Kotlin this year. But I probably won't get much farther than day 15 or so, when the difficulty ramps up. From then on it's mostly a question of knowing the specific algorithms.
And the greeks started weeks ago, what's your point? It's a cute connection and a clever name, very obviously not directly tied to any religion especially not your specific church.
