This year Christmas has arrived and is already over. It was my second DevAdvent and it’s time to take stock. Understand how it went, what worked and what didn’t. And maybe avoid making the same mistakes as last year.
So, this year I slightly changed the format of the initiative. Last year I wrote a post a day, starting on the first day of December. This year I wrote a post only on weekdays (Monday to Friday).
In addition, I didn’t follow a predetermined calendar of exercises. I chose the problem to be solved day by day. And I did it by picking from those proposed by CodeWars.
I also decided to write the posts only in English. I did it because I wanted to improve my English. And I think I did it. I hope so.
All of this allowed me to approach the contest with more calm. I solved 17 problems, last year there were 24. But I wrote 17 posts, last year there were 18. In general I am satisfied with both the solutions and what I wrote.
In addition, I experimented with two Artificial Intelligences:
- Lexica Art to generate the images of my stories;
- ChatGPT to test the capabilities of AI to solve programming problems
And so far things are positive.
However, everything is not better than last year. First of all, doing a contest of this kind alone is less interesting than doing it following a common calendar with other developers. I missed the opportunity to read the solutions of other participants and compare them with them.
In addition, I underestimated the importance of a calendar with exercises in increasing order of difficulty. Or, better, CodeWars also proposes the exercises from the simplest to the most difficult. But they are scattered. Last year, on the other hand, the problems had something that connected them to each other.
Finally, a consideration. Last year after the DevAdvent I continued to write throughout the month of January and half of February. Then, during the year, I wrote little.
This year I want to try to be more consistent with programming exercises and with writing posts. I think one solution is to continue with the same format, that is, 2 or 3 weekly posts on some programming problems. And, I would also like to continue writing 1 post a week on topics related to artificial intelligence.
Well, that’s all. Thank you for following me during this DevAdvent 2022.
