Jamie Thompson and Seth Tisue, Scala Center
Happy New Year everyone!
Advent of Code, started by Eric Wastl, is a yearly event providing daily programming puzzles between December 1st and December 25th.
Following on from last year’s blog post, let’s see how the Scala community participated in the Advent of Code 2024. We were pleased by the strong engagement on both the Scala Discord and on our solutions website.
Why we do this
At the Scala Center, we love writing code in Scala, and 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 experiences solving problems with Scala with 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.
Engagement from the community
Discord channel
This year, we had dozens of people engaging in lively conversation (with spoilers duly grayed out, of course!) 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. We especially thank those who offered friendly help to Scala newcomers.
Community solutions
We had 281 solutions submitted to the website this year, increased from 237 last year and 164 the year before, with many first time contributors.
We give a special shout-out to Paweł Cembaluk, who was the only participant to submit a solution for all 25 days, and Raphaël Marbeck, who was close behind with 24 solutions.
Explainer articles
As usual, we reached out to the community to help write the daily articles that show well-coded, well-explained solutions. The community organized a posting schedule which led to 24 completed articles. Thank you to all the authors who contributed. Each article has the author’s name at the top. The articles are on our solutions website.
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 – and learned some things, too. See you next year – happy coding!