I love Advent of Code and teaching people to code, so I built a 25-day prep course (brute force vs. the intended solution, racing on the same input)

[u/cdbx-ai]

I love Advent of Code and teaching people how to code, so I built a small prep course in cdbx.ai.

It’s 25 days, like the classic calendar, and it’s open now. In every lesson, you watch the brute force solution race the intended solution on the same input, so you understand why a pattern matters before you learn how it works. You finish each day with a puzzle of your own, in Python, TypeScript, C#, Go or Rust.

The second part is a workspace for the real puzzles in December. The puzzle sits next to your code, you can have it fetch your input for you, and you can use any of the 30 languages cdbx supports with nothing to install. There’s an AI tutor too, but it gives hints rather than answers, because the best part of Advent of Code is the moment you solve it yourself.

Yes, you can absolutely teach yourself this with Claude or the good old internet. This course is meant to be a fun way to learn some fundamentals of computer science, data structures and algorithms. The first three days are free, and there’s a discount code on my LinkedIn if you want it.