Part of the reason that I am an Engineering Manager is that I like to code. This comes into obvious conflict with the common duties of the role, like team shaping, coaching, and other things that require a slide deck. So it’s with great joy that I took my boss’s lead in the previous holiday season to participate in the Advent of Code 2021.

If you haven’t done this before, it’s based on an advent calendar, but it opens new coding puzzles each day that can be solved in any touring complete language. Like so many side projects, I did not yet complete it and may never, but I have shared my solutions for the first 15 days on github.

Even though I don’t code from day to day, I feel like these skills and their practice are extremely valuable in my job as EM.

I solved all of these with Node and vanilla JS, but I am inclined to try a few with elixir. Furthermore, I noticed that having some problems that are not language specific can be very helpful in hiring and skill assessment conversations. It puts the focus on the creativity and ability of the candidate and away from deep knowledge of a language or platform.