Are you ready to break open the first days of puzzles from the annual Advent of Code challenge? Advent of Code is an advent calendar of twenty-five programming puzzles published each December. Practicing solving puzzles is a great way to build your Python skills. This week on the show, we have previous guest and Real Python author Geir Arne Hjelle to discuss his recent article titled, “Advent of Code: Solving Your Puzzles With Python.”

We discuss the history of this online Advent calendar and the creator Eric Wastl. Geir Arne covers techniques to help you organize your code and test when solving the puzzles. He shares additional Python tools for parsing text, managing puzzle data, and visualizing your program output. We also talk about even more places you can practice solving programming puzzles.

Course Spotlight: Regular Expressions and Building Regexes in Python

In this course, you’ll learn how to perform more complex string pattern matching using regular expressions, or regexes, in Python. You’ll also explore more advanced regex tools and techniques that are available in Python.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:03 – Geir Arne’s new full-time role at Real Python
00:02:55 – Advent of Code: Solving Your Puzzles With Python
00:09:25 – Using different languages to solve the puzzles
00:12:21 – Different ways to approach the problems
00:16:31 – Sponsor: CData Software
00:17:12 – Organizing your code into reusable functions
00:19:38 – Unique user source data and managing puzzle data
00:24:40 – Additional Python tools that might be useful
00:31:13 – Video Course Spotlight
00:32:42 – Ways to enhance code output and visualization
00:34:50 – Leaderboards
00:37:52 – Real Python office hours discussion of Advent of Code
00:39:30 – Additional resources to practice solving puzzles with Python
00:50:15 – Supporting Advent of Code
00:50:40 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
00:51:59 – What do you want to learn next?
00:55:52 – Thanks and goodbye

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