December has come and gone, and the dust has settled on completing the Advent of Code 2022 calendar.
As highlighted in my previous post, I wanted to complete this year’s puzzles using my own programming language, santa-lang, which I have tailored to help aid in solving such problems.
In this article I want to discuss this experience, how the language aided in solution development, and where additions/changes were made to improve it along the way.
Over the past several years I have been slowly working mywaythrough the previous Advent of Code calendars.
For each calendar I opt to solve the puzzles in a new programming language, to familiarise myself with other ways of understanding and working.
However, there comes a time in each calendar that I grow to dislike some aspect of the language.
So I had an idea… why not give this whole programming language design a go.
That way if I grow to dislike the language, I only have myself to blame!
Over the past several years I have taken the opportunity of allocating Secret Santa’s for members of my family as an excuse to explore different programming languages and technologies.
This year has been no different, with me opting to over-engineer the problem of allocating and notifying participants by diving into AWS Step Functions and the many runtimes available on Lambda.
In this post I wish to document how I went about designing the Step Function workflow, and breaking up the problem into many specific-purpose Lambda behaviours.
The final implementation can be found in this GitHub repository.
Whilst documenting how I structured the infrastructure used for hosting our wedding website, I mentioned the possibility of showcasing its use for another application concern.
In the tradition of over engineering a problem related to our wedding - we really did not want resized/compressed photos shared through WhatsApp/iMessage of the big day.
So instead, I decided to create a Serverless photo gallery which provided guests with the ability to share the original photos in one place.
I also wanted to explore the ability to achieve this with having 100% feature parity locally in a development setting.
In this post I would like to discuss how I went about building these photo-upload/resizing and lazy-loaded gallery capabilities using AWS Lambda, S3 and DynamoDB.
The final implementation can be found in this GitHub repository.
Since being introduced to the world of Advent of Code just prior to the 2020 calendar starting, I subsequently spent the majority of 2021 completing (and documenting) the 2015, 2016 and 2017 calendars.
For the 2021 calendar I decided that it would be interesting (and challenging) to complete the calendar in C, with an initial solution written in Python to meet the daily aspect of the challenge.
Additionally, with C being such a performant language, I also wanted to set the goal of ensuring that the entire C calendar was solvable on a single CPU core in under a half-a-second (inspired by this blog post).
In this post I wish to discuss how I went about achieving this goal (spoiler410315 μs (0.410 s) on average) and the hurdles I faced along the way.