Learn and Practice Rust with Advent of Code
Rainer Stropek | @rstropek
What is AoC...
...and why should you care?
What is AoC?
- A series of Christmas-themed coding puzzles
- A new puzzle every day between Dec, 1st and Dec, 25th
- By solving, you help to get Santa out of trouble
- Puzzles start rather simple, become harder later in December
- Puzzles focus on algorithmic and data structure-related problems
- A speed coding contest
- Puzzles are published at midnight EST (UTC-5)
- Solve them as fast as possible to reach a top rank on the leaderboard
- Setup private leaderboards for your community
- A great opportunity to practice a new programming language (e.g. Rust)
- AoC is completely language-agnostic
- You can use Scratch or Excel if you want 😂
- A lot of fun 😁
How does it work?
You start on a blank slate
- You can tackle the puzzle of the day or any puzzle of past days
- You can access puzzles of previous years to practice before Dec, 1st
The Puzzles
- Puzzles embedded in a story about Santa Claus
- Description contains examples with solutions that you can use for TDD
- E.g. practice to build unit tests from them
The Puzzles
- You can download your personal puzzle input from the AoC site
- You need to parse the puzzle input properly
- Sometimes simple CSVs, sometimes more complex
- Great to practice file handling, RegEx (matches, capture groups 🔗), splitting strings into spans, etc.
- Don't download input via code with frequent HTTP requests to not overload AoC servers
-
You need to process the input properly
- Great for practicing iterators and generators
The Puzzles
- Done? Type in your answer online...
- And hopefully you will get your first...
⭐
But wait, you aren't done yet!
The Puzzles
- You get a second puzzle to earn a second star
- Typically, a slightly more difficult version of the original puzzle
- Typically, a slightly more difficult version of the original puzzle
- Again, you get examples with solutions (TDD)...
- and you are back to coding...
- Great to practice refactoring
⭐⭐
Tips
Tips
- What do you want to get out of AoC?
- Want to get better in speed coding?
- Make sure to get up early 😴⏰🔔
- Quick and dirty is fine
- Want to practice a new language?
- Don't underestimate the additional effort as AoC challenges are sometimes hard
- Code quality and idiomatic coding
- Join a group that works on AoC
- Having a fixed appointment makes it easier to stay on it
- Prepare a project/workspace structure in the first few days
- You will need it once the puzzle become harder
- Prepare family that you will be coding on Dec 24th and 25th 🎄🤣
AoC and Communities in Linz
- We participated in AoC 2020 with young coders at
- Mentors and young coders meet daily and solve puzzles together
- Two young coders made it to 50⭐in 2020 👏
- Do you want to join?
- Rust coders are very welcome
- Work on your own solutions and help young coders overcome problems
Want to do AoC 2021 in Rust?
But you don't want to code alone?
Have fun with AoC!
Learn and Practice Rust with AoC
By Rainer Stropek
Learn and Practice Rust with AoC
Each year, thousands of developers are practicing their coding skills in the *Advent of Code* event. Each day in December, you get a coding puzzle in which you have to help Santa Claus in order to save Christmas. AoC is a great opportunity for those of you who are looking for ways to practice Rust in a fun and entertaining way. Rainer will introduce you to AoC and use some exemplary AoC puzzle to illustrate what you can learn in terms of Rust development.
