The coming of the Advent of Code

This year, let’s turn November into a low-stress, high-fun team challenge. We’ll take the Advent of Code 2023 puzzles and run them together from November 15 through December 10—when we actually have everyone around. Same great puzzles, better timing.

If you haven’t tried it: Advent of Code is basically an advent calendar for devs. Instead of chocolates, you get one algorithmic puzzle per day from December 1 to 25, each wrapped in a playful storyline. Solve part one, earn a star; then part two tweaks the rules and tests how flexible your solution really is. It’s language-agnostic: use whatever you like.

We’re going to do the year of our Lord 2023 editions set so we can run it on our schedule, compare approaches, and have a little friendly fun together.

How we’ll run it

• Dates: Nov 15 → Dec 10
• Puzzles: Advent of Code 2023 (all 25 available; You do not have to finish all of them)
• Check-ins: A quick Friday knowledge-share for highlights on anything new you learned (Even as small as bubble sorting in Python)
• Leaderboard: private board for bragging rights, inspiration, and gentle chaos
• Tone: collaborative first, competitive second

The twist: pick a new language (by default)

To make it interesting, the default is: pick a language you’ve been curious about and do your AoC in that. Want to learn Rust? Perfect. Curious about Go, Kotlin, or Zig? Go for it. If you’d rather deepen a language you already use, that’s fine too—but the most fun tends to come from building a little toolbox in something new.

Why this works so well:

• You’ll quickly spot gaps and habits (parsing assumptions, off-by-one cousins, the “I’ll refactor later” ghost).
• You’ll see multiple ways to model the same problem—graphs, grids, DP, memoization, pipelines.
• You’ll collect reusable snippets: input parsing, grid utilities, BFS/DFS templates, small profilers.

Light guardrails to keep it enjoyable

• Spoilers: use spoiler tags in the channel until lunchtime. Help > hints > answers.
• Show-and-tell, not code dumps: on Fridays, share the approach and trade-offs (data structures, complexity, edge cases).
• Repo of goodies: drop notable solutions, parsing helpers, and brief READMEs so we can reuse patterns.
• Friendly leaderboard: celebrate speed, but also clarity and “I learned something” moments. Micro-awards welcome:
  • Fastest First Star
  • Cleanest Solution
  • Most Educational Refactor
  • Best Plot Twist in Part Two
• Pace with kindness: not everyone is a midnight solver. Stars earned after coffee still count as stars.

What to expect

• A little skill sharpening every day you play—even if it’s one or two puzzles a week.
• Cross-pollination of ideas: “I modeled it as a graph and part two became Dijkstra,” versus “I memoized a brute force and it went brrr.”
• The kind of jokes only we enjoy: CI dressed up as a Christmas tree, a temporary ceasefire in tabs-vs-spaces to fight trailing whitespace, someone claiming an O(1) solution because they “waited for Priya.”

Getting started

1. Pick your language (new-to-you by default).
2. Join the private leaderboard (I’ll share the code in the channel).
3. Grab Advent of Code 2023 and start wherever you like.
4. Post progress in scrum notes; on Fridays, bring a highlight or a gotcha to the knowledge-share.

If you’ve been meaning to learn Rust, Go, or “that one language” you keep bookmarking, this is your excuse. We’ll learn a bunch, borrow clever ideas from each other, and collect a tiny library of utilities that will pay off in real work.

See you in the channel—bring your language flag and your favorite debugging snack.