This year, I played 'Advent of Code Golf': a Code Golf over Advent of Code: calendar of coding puzzles by Eric Wastl. Miraculously, I have managed to fit all my solutions in 2024 symbols (a perfect number for the 2025 calendar!). But as soon as I have written the part 1, I became nagged by my results. 'All solutions' weren't really all solutions. That was worth improving...
Anthropic, the company behind the most powerful (at the moment) AI software development agent Claude Code, recently had to retire the take-home job interview assignment. The reason? They 'were about to release a model where the best strategy on take-home would be delegating to Claude Code'. According to Anthropic benchmarks, their Opus 4.5 model could beat in 2 hours what a human can make in 2 hours; and significantly beat most humans results if given 12 hours to work. Is it an incredible feat, or is it just a hype?
Every year, I play Advent of Code, an advent calendar of coding puzzles by Eric Wastl. This year I wanted an extra challenge. I decided to spend hours writing horrible, unreadable, bodged-together code full of code smells, bad practices, and hacks. I decided to do Code Golf.
I have beefs with many conventional critiques of python. People complain about GIL, people say python is slow. Along these lines lies the 'match-case' pattern matching. I'll be clear: match-case is bad, don't use it.
There are two reasons why python is 'bad'. First, it is not statically typed like C. Second, it is not as fast as C...
Raytracing in python - now with animation!
I read majestic Fabien Sanglard’s article about the “business card raytracer” a few years ago. These 1337 bytes of code would fit on a business card...
No spoilers here ;-)
