Advent of Code 2020, a Primer

Sun 29 Nov 2020

Advent of Code is a series of programming challenges released from the 1st to the 25th of December. Challenges start very easy and quickly increase in complexity. It’s a worldwide challenge with hundreds of programmers taking part each year.

What is Advent of Code?

Advent of Code is a series of programming challenges released from the 1st to the 25th of December. Challenges start very easy and quickly increase in complexity. It’s a worldwide challenge with hundreds of programmers taking part each year.

Our members often use AoC as an excuse to learn a new programming language, since the difficulty ramp is quite reasonable, and there’s no stakes if you get stuck. Since everyone is taking part to solve the same problem without any prizes on the line or the looming threat of plagiarism, there’s usually plenty of collaboration and knowledge sharing.

We have a private leaderboard so people can show their progress if they choose. While its possible to sort the leaderboard by completion time, don’t think of it as a competition! Whilst the challenges release at 5am at the UK, we don’t recommend wrecking your sleep schedule for a month over a bit of fun.

How do I Join?

You can create your account at https://adventofcode.com/, then join our private leader-board by navigating to the Private Leaderboard tab under Leaderboard and then entering the code 316574-f9ecaa5c.

When the competition starts, we’ll mostly be talking about it on our Discord on the #advent-of-code channel. Please feel free to ask for advice whenever you like!

Anything Else I Should Know?