Advent of Code 2022 in Kotlin

It’s been a great year to do Advent of Code in Kotlin. The JetBrains team released a series of YouTube streams for the first 12 days. Every day, a different Kotlin programmer shared their solution. It was a great way to get exposure to standard library features that were either new or that I was less familiar with, and I added several new methods to my Advent of Code utils library.

I’m not a competitive programmer; I would much rather take more time to write readable, factored code. What I appreciate about Advent of Code is that it can be whatever you want it to be. There’s room for competition, but there’s also room for the fun of solving the puzzles at your own pace. I definitely recommend trying it out, whether you’re new to programming or seasoned at it.

Resources

The following are some resources I’ve found especially helpful this year.

Advent of Code Jetbrains blog post. Todd Ginsberg has thorough explanations of each day in Kotlin on his website. RedBlobGames blog post on pathfinding algorithms. Dave Leeds is a cartoonist and Kotlin programmer with a really entertaining site here which discusses Kotlin semantics: https://typealias.com/. He’s also got a YouTube channel here.