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If you don’t make it past the first sentence of this post, here’s what you need to know: I’ve published a free Livebook guide about data modeling in Elixir.

For the completionists, that guide is actually one part of a series of five interactive guides about honing your scrappy programming skills in Elixir using Advent of Code problems for practice. I’ve pulled together five of my favorite problems from 2023 and distilled them down to the essential programming lessons that they have helped me hone. The full series includes discussions about code driven exploration, taming inputs, my undying love for sets, middle school math (but fun), and five of my closest algorithms.

Those who are interested can grab the full series, How to Train Your Scrappy Programmer, with an Elixir Forum discount based on alliteration. You’re welcome, nerds.

Almost every challenge that a programmer faces is in some way unique. You may have done similar things before, but each application seems to require a new twist. How can we prepare ourselves for constantly facing unknowns?

Effective programmers train to use whatever is at hand and push forward with determination in spite of obstacles. In short, they’ve gotta stay scrappy.

This bundle is a collection of five interactive guides, each exploring a different problem from the popular internet challenge site Advent of Code. In these problem solving guides, we will dive into:

• How to use Livebook, the interactive code exploration framework
• Gain insights with charts, animations, data tables, and more
• Uncover four different parsing strategies
• Leverage higher level data structures including sets and graphs
• Employ various optimization techniques, such as working backwards, pre-calculation, and even a little math (binary and middle school)
• Deploy multiple algorithms: binary search, point in polygon, flood fill, and more

By the end of these lessons you will have a full array of tools to confidently face all the unknowns ahead. You might even need to upgrade the old tool belt to a tool box.

If you don’t want five shiny new Livebooks, you can choose to pick up the individual chapters that interest you:

• Livebookisms
• The Wild World of Parsing
• Charting Our Course
• Borrowing a Cup of Algorithm

Thanks in advance for the support and don’t hesitate to ask me any questions!