Friday 6 January 2023
Jamie Thompson, Scala Center
Happy New Year everyone! We would like to take some time in this blog post to thank everyone from the Scala community and beyond who took part in the Advent of Code challenge this year! We are also thrilled to see all the related activity in our Discord channel on the Scala Discord and Scala Advent of Code website.
To recap, Advent of Code, started by Eric Wastl, is a yearly event providing daily programming puzzles between December 1st and December 25th.
If you read on you will see how the Scala community participated in the challenge, and also see how to help us write articles on solving each puzzle in a simple Scala coding style (see Martin Odersky’s keynote talk Simply Scala).
The Scala communities’ engagement
This year it was great to see over 40+ of you in the advent-of-code channel of the Scala Discord server! You participated daily, shared and discussed solutions, and challenged each other to find more performant or concise solutions.
We would also like to thank everyone who contributed your solutions to be displayed on our refreshed Scala Advent of Code 2022 website! This year, we had 164 contributed solutions from the community, and over 5000 visitors to the website! (compared to 800 visitors last year) We’re especially thankful for those of you who additionally volunteered to write whole articles to explain your solution! (see Day 10, Day 18, and Day 24)!
We’d also like to thank This Week in Scala and Scala Times for sharing our website which helped boost visits!
Help us to document the solutions
Just because it’s now the new year, it doesn’t mean we have totally wrapped up Advent of Code! At the Scala Center, we think that the Advent of Code challenge is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate to the world that programming with Scala can be simple and fun! (reminder: see Martin Odersky’s keynote talk.) So we want to continue as we did in 2021 and completely document the solutions in a simple and approachable coding style; and we are reaching out to the community to help us.
As of publishing, we are still missing code snippets in articles for days 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, and 23.
If you would like to directly contribute code snippets for one of your puzzle solutions, you can click “Edit this page” at the bottom of a puzzle page; it will take you to GitHub where you can add your code to the page. If you feel adventurous you could even write the article to explain your solution.
Instead if you would only like to share a link to your solution, you can edit the page to add a link under the section “Solutions from the community”. If your linked solution includes an Apache 2 compatible licence, this will also help others to write code snippets for the articles.
Anything you contribute will be massively appreciated!
Summary
If you read this far, thank you again everyone for contributing to Scala and participating in Advent of Code, we hope you all had fun!
Happy coding!