Generate Minimum distance codes
You don't really put any constraints on the family of codes (not even the alphabet). For real applications, you do need to put more constraints on what you want for a code. And distance may not be so important (e.g. the minimum distance of many LDPC codes is quite low, but you need to decode well beyond distance/2 to come close to capacity on many channels). 

Brute force searching a code is a bad idea, since most codes are hard to decode (you need some structure to exploit to decode efficiently). Also, computing the minimum distance is NP hard in general (Vardy, 1997).  

Here is an example of a code, which has worked well for many applications (CD's, RAID arrays, TV, Voyager mission, etc.). Reed-Solomon Codes are a family of maximum distance separable (MDS) codes, i.e. for a given length n and number of information symbols k, they have the largest distance possible (n-k+1). 

They are also easily decodable, say by the Peterson-Gorenstein-Zierler algorithm or Berklenkamp-Massey algorithm (more efficient). You can apply these to generalized reed solomon codes as well (See R.M. Roth, Introduction to coding theory, for details). Many other codes are related to this family. For example, BCH codes are alternant codes from a RS code.