Jamie Thompson, Scala Center
Happy New Year everyone! Following on from last year’s post, let’s see how the Scala community participated in the Advent of Code 2023.
Advent of Code, started by Eric Wastl, is a yearly event providing daily programming puzzles between December 1st and December 25th.
Read on to see the breakdown, but a great result is seeing even more engagement in both the Scala Discord and on our solutions website than the previous year!
Why We Do This
At the Scala Center, we love writing code in Scala, we hope you do too. One of our core priorities is to communicate excitement about Scala, which motivates us to participate in the Advent of Code and share your experiences solving puzzles with Scala to the wider programming community.
Another key priority is to improve the onboarding experience for newcomers. Part of that experience comes from the first impressions someone has reading Scala code. We hope that through hosting articles on our solutions website, newcomers can see that programming in Scala is an elegant way to solve problems. As a follow up, we aim to make this website more visible, or at least a selection from it, as a showcase for newcomers (“Scala by example”). You can help us complete more of the solutions.
Engagement from the Community
Discord Channel
This year, we had over 40 people in the #advent-of-code channel on the Scala Discord server! Thank you to everyone who shared their code and/or helped each other come up with the best solutions!
Community Solutions
We also had many more submitted solutions (237!) to our website than the last year (164 submissions), with a lot of first time contributors. Check out this comparison by day!
We can give a special shout-out to Rui Alves who for the second year running has submitted a solution for each day.
Explainer Articles
Like usual, we reached out to the community to help write the daily articles that explain how to solve the puzzle (e.g. day 6 by @spamegg1, or day 20 by @merlinorg). This year the community organised a posting schedule, and we were much more successful in getting them written! (more than 2x the previous year) - Thank you to all the authors who contributed!
Visitors
For fun here is a chart of the daily visits to the solutions website, thank you again to This Week in Scala and Scala Times for sharing and helping boost visits!
Posting Schedule
Thank you again to all the authors below who contributed articles to our solutions website.
| Day | Author | Published? |
|---|---|---|
1 (Fri) |
@sjrd |
✅ (view) |
2 (Sat) |
@bishabosha |
✅ (view) |
3 (Sun) |
@iusildra |
✅ (view) |
4 (Mon) |
@shardulc |
✅ (view) |
5 (Tue) |
@GrigoriiBerezin |
✅ (view) |
6 (Wed) |
@spamegg1 |
✅ (view) |
7 (Thu) |
@anatoliykmetyuk |
✅ (view) |
8 (Fri) |
@prinsniels |
✅ (view) |
9 (Sat) |
@SethTisue |
✅ (view) |
10 (Sun) |
@EugeneFlesselle |
✅ (view) |
11 (Mon) |
@natsukagami |
✅ (view) |
12 (Tue) |
@mbovel |
✅ (view) |
13 (Wed) |
@adpi2 |
✅ (view) |
14 (Thu) |
@anatoliykmetyuk |
✅ (view) |
15 (Fri) |
@sjrd |
✅ (view) |
16 (Sat) |
@iusildra |
✅ (view) |
17 (Sun) |
@stewSquared |
✅ (view) |
18 (Mon) |
@EugeneFlesselle |
✅ (view) |
19 (Tue) |
@mbovel |
✅ (view) |
20 (Wed) |
@merlinorg |
✅ (view) |
21 (Thu) |
- | 💭 |
22 (Fri) |
- | 💭 |
23 (Sat) |
- | 💭 |
24 (Sun) |
@merlinorg |
✅ (view) |
25 (Mon) |
@bishabosha |
✅ (view) |
A Call to Action
Please help us to complete the archive of solutions to Advent of Code. On any day such as day 21 you can click “edit this page” at the bottom, and write an article to explain how to solve the days puzzle. Be sure to observe the style guide.
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!