Advent of Code 2022

What is it, what why should you care?

Advent of Code is a yearly month-long release of various programming challenges at midnight ET (UTC-5) - like an Advent Calender, but you get challenges instead of chocolates!

How to participate

All you gotta do is head on over to the site, Log In - they support GitHub, Twitter, Twitter, and Reddit - choose a day, read the challenge, and code up a solution!

Each challenge usually comes with a simplified example that's walked through, after which is a link to get your unique input - which is usually quite large - and if your code really does work, the result will earn you a star when entered into the answer field!

Almost every challenge has an additional part 2, usually building off the initial code, and this commonly rewards those that solved the first part in a more proper or efficient way.

If you're reading in the future or a non-december month, thankfully you can visit the previous challenges for any year and start working on them at your leisure!

Competition

It's not only popular for it's challenges, but also for the competition - those that rank in the top 100 accrue scores, and are shown on the leaderboard for that day!

Of course those those of us not fast enough to get in the top 100, there are private leaderboards creatable and joinable so you can compete with your friends!

Community

Of course the idea of releasing challenges in a timed manor isn't unique, but what has made Advent of Code so popular is - in addition to the challenges of course - the community that has grown around it!

One I greatly enjoy is the Subreddit - not only does it host daily megathreads of solutions to the challenges in a wide variety of languages, but it's also a great place to ask for help, or to see how others have upped the ante on the challenges - and look at the pretty visualizations!

Conclusion

At the end of the day why it can be fun to compete, the challenges are meant to be a learning experience, so no matter your speed, you can still learn something new - feel free to follow along with me as I work through the challenges this year - with an extra personal challenge of creating a visualization for each day!