Episode: 3996
Title: HPR3996: Holiday Challenges Series - Ep 1 - Advent of Code
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3996/hpr3996.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:25:31

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3996 from Monday the 27th of November 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Holiday Challenges Series at one event of code.
It is hosted by Trey and is about four minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, discussing challenges to help you enjoy the holiday season.
Hello and welcome to Episode 1 of my Holiday Challenges Series.
This is Trey.
Since some of the information you are about to hear is time specific, I want to let you
know that I am recording this near the end of November 2023.
Whichever holidays you celebrate this time of year, life generally gets busy and stressful.
It could be shopping, or cooking, or cleaning, or school activities, or buying, assembling,
wrapping, and delivering gifts, or planning time with family, or dealing with visiting
family, or scheduling time off from work, or managing extra work while others have scheduled
their own time off, or a whole plethora of other things this time of year can be stressful.
A few years ago I discovered a fun activity which challenged my mind and helped me focus
and detach from the stress for a little while each day through the month of November.
It helped me manage the stress in an enjoyable way.
Since then I have found and tried several other similar activities, so I wanted to share
a little about them with you for the next few episodes, so you can see what might work
for you.
So today's episode, we are going to deal with the first of the recommendations I have,
which is called the Advent of Code Challenge, and there is a URL in the show notes.
In HPR episodes 2973 and 3744, Daniel Persson shared some great details about this challenge.
I encourage you to go and review his episodes, but the TLDR, maybe the TLDL too long didn't
listen for Advent of Code is that it is a 25 day challenge which begins on December 1.
Once you register at Advent of Code.com, each day you will be presented with a problem
to solve and some data to use for verification of that your program works.
You can choose to use any programming language or application you desire to produce the answer.
Last year I used this to brush up on my Python skills.
Others use Visual Basic, C and all of its variants, Rust, Go, etc.
I have seen people use Coball, Fortran, and Pascal, or even Microsoft Excel to solve
the problems.
It is really up to you.
You are then presented a data set which is unique to your logon and against which you
can run your code.
When complete, you submit the answer you came up with at the Advent of Code.com website
and they will tell you if you are correct or not.
If you are competitive and really good, there is a global leaderboard.
If you want to compete with a group of friends, you can build your own leaderboard and invite
others to take part in it.
If somebody is really adventurous, they might want to create a hacker public radio 2023
Advent of Code group for people who want to participate.
That won't be me, but it might be one of you.
There are tons of resources online from YouTube channels to Reddit.
There is a link to the Reddit in the show notes to Discord, also a link in the show
notes.
So, if you are looking for a way to challenge your mind and detach from holiday stress,
Advent of Code might be something you might want to try.
If this is not your cup of tea, I will be sharing several other options for holiday challenges
in future episodes.
Bye for now.
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