December 1st is much anticipated among those who like programming puzzles. It is time to start collecting stars by solving small puzzles on the Advent of Code website with the goal of amassing 50 stars by Christmas Day, December 25th. Raku has also opened its advent calendar and there's a brand new Bekk Christmas blog with informational content on multiple topics. 

For more, see Advent Of Code 2023 Unlocked

Continuing his well established tradition Eric Wastl has posted the first pair of puzzles on his 2021 Advent Calendar. Each day until December 25th Wastl, who is the creator of Vanilla JS and PHP Sadness will set a new puzzle 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. Each day there are two puzzles, with the second puzzle unlocked when you complete the first.  Although at the time of writing we are only 10.5 hours into Day 1, almost 50,000 users have completed both puzzles and another 8,484 have completed the first. 

We can credit Perl with pioneering the idea of a programming advent calendar with daily articles with a festive theme and the Raku Advent Calendar now continues the tradition. Now in its 13th year, but only the third with its new name this year's first advent post solves a problem faced by Santa of creating thumbnails of approaching 2 billion images. The elf named Sparkleface comes up with a script called sparkle-sizer which is fully explained in the blog post which also shows the source code - also available on GitHub.

We first met Norwegian tech, design, strategy and management consultancy, Bekk last year when it produced eleven separate advent calendars, each on a different site. For 2021 it is still offering  informational content on multiple  topics but this year it is cosolidated on a single platform with a single domain bekk.christmas which also lets you access the previous advent calendars from 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. For December 1st you'll find an article on Prototypes in JavaScript which has a festive theme. There's also an article with the title Creating great security culture  in English and two others in Norwegian only, one on Machine Learning and the other in the UX category with the translated title Less "teach" and more "learn together". There's also the first of a 3-part podcast in Norwegian that addresses the question "What is nudging?".  

More Information

Advent of Code

Bekk Christmas

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Advent Of Code 2023 Unlocked 

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