If you know me, you know that I’m a huge fan of programming challenges and code katas. Sometimes I think I missed my calling as a competitive programmer.

This past month I was able to satisfy my cravings for programming challenges with Eric Wastl’s Advent of Code.

Solving a programming challenge every day for nearly a month taught me interesting lessons about myself and my current programming language of choice: Elixir.

Here’s a quick rundown.

I had a lot of fun with this year’s Advent of Code challenges. I learned quite a bit about Elixir and about myself. I even made some good friends in the #adventofcode channel of the Elixir Slack group.

I’ll definitely be doing this again next year.

If you didn’t do this year’s Advent of Code, it’s not too late! Go check out the problems, and if you’re curious, check out my solutions on Github.