As an eventful year comes to a close, it’s time to stop and say “Thank You.” Our gratitude goes out to all our partners, clients, and most importantly, our Xperts, whose dedication and passion made 2024 a successful year. We are proud of how much we achieved together.

This month also brought a special highlight: the annual Advent of Code by Eric Wastl once again provided an opportunity to tackle challenging programming puzzles. Our Xperts seized the chance to explore new programming languages, develop efficient algorithms, and discover creative solutions. It was particularly exciting to see the varied range of approaches.

The first task involved sorting two columns of numbers in ascending order, calculating the differences between the pairs, and summing the results. One team member took on the challenge of solving it entirely with Unix tools. By cleverly using awk, sort, and paste, they came up with an efficient solution. The decisive one-liner elegantly combined all steps into a single command:

paste <(awk '{print $1}' input.txt | sort -n) <(awk '{print $2}' input.txt | sort -n) | awk '{ sum += ($1 > $2) ? $1 - $2 : $2 - $1 } END { print sum }'

The result: 11. Note: the numbers are taken from the sample task.

Such creative approaches highlight how personal growth and team spirit contribute to an inspiring work environment. The competition runs until 25 December, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed for all participants tackling the remaining challenges.

Looking ahead to the upcoming holidays, we’d like to remind you that our office will be closed from 24 December to 1 January 2024. We’ll be back on 2 January, ready for new projects and challenges.

We wish everybody a relaxing holiday season, a wonderful end to the year, and an exciting start to 2025.