Are you doing the Advent of Code?
Published by marco on
No. No, I’m not.
I was briefly considering it because two good programmer friends[1] of mine asked me, and it seemed like it might be kind of fun to compare our solutions.
But … 24 days, man.
I’ve got other things to do. Like, a lot of other things to do.
I am not in any way bored or looking for things to do.
I’m not even lacking in programming projects that I could be working on.
I’m teaching a JavaScript class right now, for which I’m constantly refining the examples and project code, trimming the sails for the particular people in the current class.
I’ve got a whole web site to which I’ve been meaning to do a bunch of tweaks. I’m just now getting the time to get around to it; I certainly don’t need to prioritize arbitrary programming tasks.
I’ve got a ton of stuff to write that interests me more than writing code for a problem that looks for all the world like a job-interview assessment assignment. I just finished up a 48-page summary of my week’s reading and writing in Links and Notes for November 29th, 2024. I’ve got a stack of book reviews a mile high that I’ve not given up on. Yet. Those kinds of things takes time—and it’s important to me, much more so than the aforementioned programming exercises.
So, no, I’m not doing advent of code. I’d like to compare solutions with my friends, but not enough to reshuffle all of my priorities.
I also wonder who came up with the advent of code? All of the time that people spend every day working on these arbitrary examples is good training, I guess. But training for what? Job interviews? It’s all time that they’re not spending on other creative projects or spending on open-source projects. I’m not trying to knock it at all—becoming a good programmer means just putting in the time.
But the question is what are putting in your time on? When I was the same age as one of my (much younger) friends, I poured all of my time into building a web site—that I’m still using every single day a quarter of a century later.
The featured sponsor for December 8th is Optiver, which says it codes “sub-nanosecond trading systems”, whatever the hell that means. So, they’re trying to find people to make fast trading systems. Just. Stop. We need brilliant coders to be building software useful to society, not to billionaires. Those things are pretty much diametrically opposed. Let’s take a closer look at the list of sponsors.
- Jane Street (trading)
- A bunch of online training-course providers…
- Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting before they had to rename themselves after the Enron debacle, but don’t worry, they’re far, far larger than ever, having failed upward as expected).
- JPMorgan Chase (‘nuff said)
- Lighttricks (AI company…🙄)
- Ahrefs (“indexing” company, but almost certainly a funnel for AI content)
- Shopify (they own the world of online storefronts, having homogenized that part of the world for us; thanks)
- Jump Trading
- American Express
- Bank of America
- ING Bank
- …and a bunch of other, smaller things
It doesn’t look great, if I’m being honest.
Anyway, I’m doing a meta advent of code, in which I just work on as much stuff as I can, but of my own choosing and on my own schedule.
Comments
#1 − Reply from a colleague
marco –
A colleague responded with Yes I am doing Advent of Code by Austin Jones (Austin's Journey for Meaning). He wrote,
“Have you heard of Inktober? In short, it’s a drawing challenge where you draw in ink based on a prompt every day of October. You don’t win anything. There’s no cool badge. It’s just fun and a challenge (try to draw something subverting 31 days in a row). I really enjoy to break out my pen and pad and render some ideas.”
I wrote him back,
Sounds like you’re doing it for the right reason.
I agree with what you wrote. Everything I do is also for fun, as well. It’s why I’m kind of bad at adulting. How does my pension look? What? I’ve not got time for that! I’m writing about injustice in Syria! I’m reading about syntax differences between OCaml and Haskell! Ask my wife; she’s the only one who knows how to log on to our online banking anyway.
I’m mystified by posts that talk about “driving engagement” to personal web sites. Why would you do that? Don’t monetize everything you do for fun! Because then you can’t pick and choose when to do it! And then … it stops being fun.
Influencers know what I’m talking about.
I’m lucky in that my job is also mostly fun.
When I switched jobs to Uster a few years back, I went from almost 100% software-engineering, programming, systems design, architecture to … none of that at first. But I was still enjoying the hell out of my job.
How?
I realized that, although I’d looked for a job for programming, what I really found to be fun is problem-solving.
That, and also recognition and acknowledgement that what I was doing was appreciated and useful. That helped a lot … and had been nearly completely lacking at my own company.
Huh. I started off with the best of intentions not to write too much, in the hopes that I wouldn’t appear to be trying to overshadow your lovely message and yet here we are.