Lightning talk by the Poznań Ruby Community organizer at wroclove.rb 2023. Introduces Advent of Code (annual December puzzle event, easy at first, then gets harder so people drop off; huge community, memes, discussion of quests and solutions). Defines code golfing — solving problems with the shortest possible source code, counting characters/bytes. Notes dedicated golf languages (Golf Script as a Ruby macro language; various cryptic base-64 / compiled languages) exist specifically to shrink programs. Walks through an Advent of Code input-parsing example, first with a trivial solution and then shrunk to ~100 characters using eval on strings, stripping spaces and hacking whitespace-sensitive spots. Lessons learned from golfing: deep dive into the language itself; Ruby's `$`-prefixed global variables are useful for script file parsing; shorter code is NOT easier to understand; Ruby supports recursive arrays (rendered in inspect as `[...]`). Ends recommending Ruby code-golf tips online.