December 1st is much anticipated among those who like programming puzzles. It is time to start solving small but tricky puzzles on the Advent of Code website with the goal of amassing 50 stars by Christmas Day, December 25th.

This tradition was started by Eric Wastl in 2015 so 2024 is its 10th year. Each day until December 25th Wastl, who is also the creator of Vanilla JS and PHP Sadness will set two new puzzles that can be solved in any programming language you like. The puzzles are released daily at midnight EST and points are awarded for the quickest solutions with a leaderboard listing the 100 users with the highest total scores. The second puzzle is only unlocked on successful completion of the first.  Although at the time of writing we are around 14 hours into Day 1, almost  70,000 users have completed both puzzles and another 5850 have completed the first.

The leaderboard fills up quickly - according to the About page in any day it can be anywhere between two minutes and an hour. The rubric also advises that you should not give away the solution until the leaderboard is full and a recent addition to the etiquette advises:

Please don't use AI / LLMs (like GPT) to automatically solve a day's puzzles until that day's global leaderboards are full.

After explaining that the leaderboards are for human competitors only, Wastl adds: 

If you want to use AI to help you solve puzzles, I can't really stop you, but I feel like it's harder to get better at programming if you ask an AI to do the programming for you.

In fact there are many resources to help people improve their programming skills through Advent of Code. One is offered by Real Python where Philipp Ascany presents a 22-lesson video course helping newcomers to solve Advent of Code puzzles using the puzzles for 2022. You'll need to subscribe to Real Python to go beyond a few introductory videos at a cost of $39.99 for a single month or $249.99 billed yearly. Of course, this gives you access to a lot more tutorial content, membership of the Real Python community and more.

This year JetBrains, an Advent of Code sponsor, is offering prizes for solving the puzzles in Kotlin. To help participants solve the puzzles, there are daily livestreams. Starting today and continuing until December 12th, every day at 5:00 pm UTC, Sebastian Aigner, Kotlin Developer Advocate, and special guests will go live on YouTube to walk through the daily puzzle and chat about solutions and strategies. You can view past sessions here.

More Information

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Solve Advent of Code 2024 Puzzles in Kotlin and Win Prizes

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