If you thought Advent Calendars were just for kids think again. It seems that there's a well-established tradition of programming-related advent calendars, including Advent of Code.

This annual tradition comes from Eric Wastl who is the creator of  Vanilla JS, PHP Sadness among other contributions. It is an Advent calendar (from December 1st to 24th) of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. The puzzles are released daily at midnight EST (UTC - 5) and points are awarded for the quickest solutions with a leaderboard listing the 100 users with the highest total scores.

As well as a speed contest, people use these puzzles for interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other, with private leaderboards. To take part you have to authenticate using GitHub, Google, Twitter or Reddit and there's a sub-Reddit where you can find hints if you get stuck. This is a very popular resource as revealed by its Stats. Each puzzle has two parts and, at the time of writing (on Dec 6) for the first puzzle has had 112975 complete solutions with another 7586 first part solutions.

Advent isn't just for puzzles, however. Other programming-related advent calendars vying for your attention are informational.

This year's Perl Advent Calendar is continuing its article-a-day tradition and began with an appropriately fest tale about how Perl's TidyAll library "makes it trivial for the elves to keep their code formatting consistent and clean."

Now in its 12th year, but only the second with its new name, Raku which as we reported replaced the former Perl 6 identity, the Raku Advent Calendar had as its opening salvo: Day 1: Why Raku is the ideal language for Advent of Code.

But if you are looking for programming advent calenders the one-stop shop has to be: 

As Kristofer Giltvedt Selbekk puts it on the Bekk blog, introducing the second season of its advent calendars:

"Pandemic or not, Christmas time is a time for wonder, joy and sharing." 

This year the Oslo-based Bekk Consulting, a company that proclaims itself as:

"merging technology with user experience, product innovation and strategy"

has eleven advent calendar sites, ten of which sharing articles while the other, on the topic of Innovation has podcasts which are only in Norwegian.

If you want some interesting material to read on JavaScript how about:

The site for Kotlin afficandos reads:

Finally, and stretching the topic just a little for the sake of a nice graphic, did you know about the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar? Now in its 13th year a new stunning image of the universe is presented daily between December 1st and December 25th on The Atlantic. Yes it's another blatant way of encouraging people to return to its webstite on a daily basis, but the pictures are breathtaking and, given the state of this year's Festive Season, a welcome bit of escapism.

More Information

Advent of Code

Raku Advent Calendar

Perl Advent Calendar

Bekk Christmas

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info