Advent of Code is a pretty fun December activity – an advent calendar of programming puzzles with a story tying them all together. The puzzles are released at midnight ET, which is conveniently 9 PM PT. I did Advent of Code for the first time last year (2021), and really enjoyed it. Since I became a manager I rarely get to write code for work (and try to minimize it, even so), and especially don’t get to write the kind of code that exercises the problem-solving part of my brain.