About Advent of Code Hints 2019

Welcome to my Advent of Code Hints 2019 blog. Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as a speed contest, interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other.

The purpose of this blog is to to document my own thought processes working through the challenges – and hopefully to provide some information to help out beginner and intermediate users.

The aim here is not for perfection – but to walk through step-by-step how I approached each problem, including mistakes I made along the and how I (hopefully) worked through them.

I’ll try and provide hints breaking down the puzzles into smaller mini-puzzles – so that you can still ultimately solve them on your own and in your own way. However my full solutions will be available as well…

My answers will mostly be in PHP, as that is the language I’m most comfortable with. However I may also try and mix it up a bit with some Node.js or Python.

Finally on a personal note – I have a full-time job and 2 young kids at home. So I am under serious time-constraints and will likely NOT have time to perfect these answers. Again perfection is not the goal, but getting to a “good enough” solution while learning something and having some fun along the way.

All code can be found on GitHub. If you want to find out more please read Getting Started first. If you have any questions or corrections or anything else you’d like to say – please get in touch – I’d love to hear what you think.