Advent of Code: The Corporate Edition

It’s July 7th, and the air in the open-plan office is thick with a sense of déjà vu. Not for the holidays, mind you, but for the annual Advent of Code, which, by some miracle of corporate inertia, is still ongoing. Somewhere between the third Slack notification about the new company wellness initiative and the fifth Jira ticket marked “urgent,” a brave soul suggests, “Let’s check if Advent of Code is working yet!”

The idea, like all great corporate initiatives, was immediately escalated to management, over half a year ago. Within hours, a cross-functional task force was assembled. There was a kickoff meeting, a Confluence page, and a shared Google Sheet. The CTO, who hasn’t written code since the last time Java was cool, declared, “This will be a great team-building exercise. Let’s make it Agile.”

January: Requirements Gathering (a.k.a. The First Delay)

Before a single line of code was written, the team scheduled a requirements workshop. After all, how can you solve a problem if you don’t have a 40-slide PowerPoint outlining the business value of each puzzle? The Product Owner insisted on user stories for every day’s challenge. The Scrum Master created a Kanban board. Someone suggested a Design Sprint. The intern, who just wanted to write some Python, quietly wept.

February: Architecture Astronauts Assemble

By now, the team had decided that a monolithic script was too risky. Instead, they proposed a microservices architecture. Each Advent of Code day would be its own service, containerized and orchestrated via Kubernetes. There was talk of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and a GraphQL API to unify the results. The DevOps engineer, who was hoping to take some time off, has been on-call ever since.

March: The AI Pivot

A VP read a Medium post about AI and demanded that all solutions be “AI-powered.” The team spent two weeks integrating a large language model that generates explanations for every puzzle solution and predicts tomorrow’s challenge. GPU cloud costs exceeded the annual coffee budget. The CFO was not amused.

April: Cloud Infrastructure and Networking Limbo

Progress ground to a halt as the team discovered that nobody had permissions to actually deploy anything to the cloud. After a month of tickets, escalations, and “just one more meeting,” someone finally provisioned a Kubernetes cluster, on the wrong cloud provider. The networking team, last seen in 2019, was summoned to configure VPCs, subnets, and firewall rules. They responded with a 200-page PDF and a single cryptic Slack emoji.

May: Audit Season

Just as the first container was about to go live, Internal Audit arrived. Apparently, the project had triggered a compliance review because someone mentioned “data” in a standup. The team spent the next four weeks filling out risk assessment forms, attending mandatory security trainings, and explaining to Audit why “root access” is not a personality trait.

June: The Third-Party Dependency

Somewhere in the depths of the codebase, a mysterious third-party dependency appeared. Nobody knows who added it, what it does, or why it requires a monthly payment to a shell company registered in the Cayman Islands. Every attempt to remove it breaks the build. Rumors circulate about who’s getting a kickback, but the only thing anyone can prove is that the dependency’s documentation is written in Esperanto.

Early July: Standups, Status, and Scope Creep

Daily standups have devolved into status theater. The front-end team wants to build a React dashboard to visualize progress, complete with dark mode and animated fireworks for Independence Day. The back-end team is refactoring the refactor. QA files a bug report: “Nothing works, but at least the loading spinner is AI-generated.”

Meanwhile, the original Advent of Code puzzles have been quietly replaced with custom challenges from the VP’s nephew, who just finished a bootcamp. The team is now solving “FizzBuzz, but with AI-generated poetry and GDPR compliance.”

July 7th: Budget Review (a.k.a. The Reckoning)

Finance schedules a meeting to discuss the project’s “unexpected” costs. The line item for “AI consulting” raises eyebrows. The cloud bill is now a line item of its own. The CTO assures everyone that these investments are “future-proofing.” The only thing being future-proofed is the team’s collective sense of despair.

The Great Pivot (Coming Soon)

With no working product and Q3 OKRs looming, leadership decides that Advent of Code is not aligned with business priorities. The project is rebranded as “Holiday Innovation Accelerator.” All previous work is deprecated. The team is instructed to deliver a proof-of-concept for a machine learning-powered Secret Santa algorithm. The data scientist, who was just here for the free cookies, is now the project lead.

Delivery (Eventually)

At some point in the future, the team will deliver a PowerPoint deck summarizing their “learnings.” The actual codebase is a tangled mess of half-finished microservices, abandoned AI models, a single, lonely Python script that still prints “Hello, World!,” and a third-party dependency that nobody dares to touch.

The CEO will congratulate the team on their “agility” and “innovative spirit.” The project will be declared a success in the company newsletter. The intern will update their LinkedIn: “Contributed to enterprise-grade holiday coding initiative.”

Epilogue: Cynical Wisdom for the Festive Season

In the end, the true spirit of Advent of Code in a corporate setting isn’t about solving puzzles or learning new skills. It’s about the journey: the endless meetings, the shifting requirements, the budget overruns, the mysterious dependencies, and the inevitable delivery of something nobody asked for, months late and several thousand dollars over budget.

As the team packs up for the summer holidays, one thing is clear: next year, they’ll just do Secret Santa. At least that only requires a spreadsheet.