December 1st is the day on which, each year, Eric Wastl opens a very special advent calendar. You don't get rewarded with chocolates in the Advent of Code - instead it's stars for solving coding puzzles.

And already less than half way through the first day over 130K stars have been awarded to over 80K participants

If you are not already familiar with Advent of Code you can read our introduction from 2020 when we first reported on this annual tradition in Advent Of Code For Programmers or head across to Real Python where Philipp Ascany presents a 22-lesson video course helping newcomers to solve Advent of Code puzzles.

All the videos are short, on averfage around 2 minutes, and after the second one has outlined the format of Advent of Code. the third one and  explains that over the course of the 25-day Advent of Code, 1st December to 25th December you need to collect fifty stars by solving puzzles. Each puzzle grants one star and every day, there are actually two puzzles, with the second puzzle for a day is only unlocked once the first one is complete.

As every year Advent of Code has a theme to do with some problem faced by Santa's Elves. This year:

Something is wrong with global snow production, and you've been selected to take a look. The Elves have even given you a map; on it, they've used stars to mark the top fifty locations that are likely to be having problems.

The Day 1 puzzle has the title Trebuchet?! and the storyline continues: 

you realize that the Elves are already loading you into a trebuchet ("please hold still, we need to strap you in").

As they're making the final adjustments, they discover that their calibration document (your puzzle input) has been amended by a very young Elf who was apparently just excited to show off her art skills. Consequently, the Elves are having trouble reading the values on the document.

Those experienced in this type of puzzle will quickly grasp how to solve it and unlock the second part but if you need help, not with this puzzle but the ones from the 2022 Advent Calendar Real Python shows you how to tackle them. 

While Advent of Code clearly takes the prize for most popular advent calendar, there are others. The Perl Advent Calendar which we met in 2020 is continuing its article-a-day tradition over "twenty-four merry days of Perl". The first for this year is with an ornamented rendition of Jingle Bells. 

Bekk is also geared up for Christmas with 100 new items with a festive theme in Norwegian and English, three to five of which will be posted each day until December 24. See Time To Open Advent Of Code for more on Bekk Christmas.

More Information

Advent of Code

Advent of Code: Solving Problems With Python

Perl Advent Calendar

Bekk Christmas 

Related Articles

Time To Open Advent Of Code

Advent Of Code - More Than You Might Expect

Advent Of Code For Programmers 

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