Advent of Code 2015

Over the past month, I've been slowly working on the Advent of Code programming puzzles. I was alerted to this by a colleague at work and decided to give them a try. You get one puzzle each day, with two parts, and solving them gives you a star to light up the Christmas tree (since this was in December and holiday-themed). I decided to use Python to solve these as it's one of the programming languages I know best, but any language would have worked.

Below, I describe a few of my favorite puzzles, the hardest ones I found, and things I learned from this.

Favorite Books of 2015

As I like to do every year, I'd like to briefly point out the best books I've read this year. This is not necessarily books that have been published this year, but rather books that I had the opportunity to read this year.

Unfortunately, this year has been very busy and I haven't been able to read much for the past few months. Over the full year, I've only read 14 books, one of them a novella. According to Goodreads, this was around 4800 pages, just over half of what I had read in 2014 (8000 pages over 20 books). A top 5 would be too much, so instead I present a top 3, though 2 are from the same author.