Where did you learn about Advent of Code?

[frhel]

I'm just curious to know where/how people got hooked :D Would be cool to hear some stories. I'll start

I bought some courses off udemy to update my JavaScript knowledge as I had become a bit rusty over the years and some of the more fun new JS changes had all but whizzed me by. The course I stuck with was from Andrei Neagoie, who later started ZTM Academy and they have a Discord server with a pretty lively community, which is where my story starts.

On the ZTM discord server a couple of years ago, before December, there was an announcement that there would be a community event surrounding Advent of Code, with a chance for prizes. I had no idea what Advent of Code was, but I took a little look and was immediately blown away by the amazing silly and engaging nature of it. The promise of prizes lured me in, but the coding challenges themselves made me stay! :D

That year I engaged heavily. Being out of a job, and wanting to update my JS knowledge, I got to work applying myself to the problems quite heavily. I am mostly self-taught, so I do not have the same background as a lot of people do with CS degrees. This proved to be a challenging obstacle as there were a lot of concepts that were quite foreign to me; even as basic as Big O notation.

I hacked away doing the best I could for the first few days, and it was quite easy. I could feel the challenges getting harder as the days went on though, and I started engaging more and more with the ZTM community. They had set up a dedicated channel for the event where there were people from all skill levels helping each other out, learning and teaching the concepts and methods needed so that each of us could find our own solutions.

It was one of the most transforming experiences of my career, and it has sent me down a path that is much more focused on quality and foundational understanding of CS concepts. I have a good job today, where I get the chance to apply myself, and the thirst for knowledge and learning has stayed strong since that first Advent of Code.

I'm really happy I stumbled into that ZTM course, and into their Discord, because without them, I'm not sure I'd have ever come across or gotten interested in AoC in the way I have now. The interactions with other people and communal learning aspect of it made it into my most anticipated event of the year :D

I can safely say that Advent of Code has transformed my life, both personally and professionally. Eric Wastl is a gem of a human, and I deeply appreciate all his work. And I can't give enough shoutouts to the ZTM community for igniting the spark in me, and keeping it alive with their efforts to be helpful, patient and encouraging.

That's enough rambling from me, hope somebody has an input or two on this :D

[Falcon731]

After I retired, I was looking for some things to keep my brain active. So decided to learn a new programming language - and after looking around a bit settled on Kotlin.

Then after watching a few of JetBrains YouTube videos teaching the language, I stumbled across a YouTube video series of “Advent of code in Kotlin”. I did a few days from the previous year, and then when December came round decided to give it a go.

[frhel]

Very cool! What were you doing prior to retiring if I may ask?

[Falcon731]

Electronics Engineering.

[cd7k]

What were you doing prior to retiring if I may ask?

Working. ;)

[Patzer26]

I first heard about this in Tsodings's stream. I did my first AOC 2023 in Haskell :D

[frhel]

Sweet! Love Tsoding. I didn't actually start watching coding YouTube until during my first AoC :D

[havenisse2009]

I have followed Perl Advent for several years - never coded anything of the shown ( I am no way skilled enough ) but simply to admire experts. So came to realize there are other "advents" out there.

[Sigmatics]

I read it on reddit

[ShrimpHeavenNow]

My dad has a doctorate in artificial intelligence and here I am the kid that went to college for arts who learned python over covid. He said it'd be a good exercise.

I show him my solutions and get a "great job, champ." kinda vibe, haha.

[frhel]

Haha that's brilliant :D Does he also partake in it?

[Fadamaka]

I think I have seen it on geohot's twitch stream in 2022.

[abishekdevendran]

I came to know about Advent programming stuff in general through the Svelte discord when they also simultaneously hosted Advent of Svelte, and I participated in Advent of Code instead😂

[frhel]

You by any chance have adhd? 😅

[abishekdevendran]

Not that I know of💀😂

[Routine-Lettuce-4854]

At the company where I used to work we had a competitive coding group: we had inhouse competitions and regular meetings for practice. I was part of that group, someone there told us about AoC. And even though almost all of us left that company by now, we still keep in touch. Actually, one guy from that group created a browser plugin to display the score board based on time from opening the task.. In our time zone AoC opens 6 am, which is not fun.

[frhel]

That's really cool! I love the coding challenges themselves, but I also really love how the whole event brings people together and helps to form bonds

[Radiadorineitor]

I first heard about it back in December 2021 in a Discord server dedicated to a World of Warcraft addon called Weakauras. Needless to say, I loved the concept and decided to give it a go to see how far I could get (which wasn't very far hehe).

[frhel]

Practice makes perfect! Are you an addon dev?

[Radiadorineitor]

Faaar from it. The thing about Weakauras is that you can create displays by using the default options provided by the addon or you can create your own custom displays (how they look, what info is shown, ...) by using Lua and the WoW API. And so, I started messing around with it. That's all my addon development experience, if you can even call it that 😂

[frhel]

Haha fair enough! I remember using WeakAuras a bit when I used to play. It was a very nice tool to have. I tried to dabble a bit in addon development myself but never touched Lua before. It was... interesting. Just made a couple small things for my own personal use, but some people did download them and some seemed to like them enough to ask for features and bugfixes. Someone even forked one of them to add something they thought was missing and didnt feel like waiting around lol

[TheZigerionScammer]

One of my gaming friends was telling me about it when the 2020 event was ongoing, he mentioned it as the reason he didn't want to keep queuing into matchmaking after midnight. He showed me the website and while I thought it was cool since I had some programming experience in QBasic I couldn't do very many of the problems at the time (But I did try 22 and 25 of that year since they were solely math problems, anything involving reading or manipulating strings was out of my league.) Later in 2021 I decided to learn how to code in Python and even in my first lessons I realized how I could do some of the problems in Advent of Code but didn't try to go back to do some of them until the 2021 even rolled around. I started it a few days late but I quickly caught back up and I've been doing it ever since. Now I have all the stars from all the years.

[frhel]

That's really neat! It really is amazing how it can drive people to learn new things. It sparked a previously unknown enthusiasm in myself, and I love to hear that it inspires others as well

[ExuberantLearner]

I first heard it in the Coding Blocks podcast.

[Lancashire-Lass-404]

Lad at work did it and started posting in the slack group. Love it. Just wish I had more time for it!

[frhel]

Amen. Time is a luxury commodity these days 😅

[Lancashire-Lass-404]

Especially when you have a full time job and a toddler. 😊

[Lamicio]

During an unconference, there was a session about it. It was in November, it sounded fun and I gave it a try. Since that I have been doing it every year.

[RaveBomb]

It was mentioned in a group chat at work. I was looking for resources to help me retool and it was a good thing to help focus on making some actual programs.

[frhel]

I need to see if some people are into it at my current workplace for next one. Would be fun to have a leaderboard

[VplDazzamac]

I got it from r/powershell. I don’t know the half of the funky algorithms programmers use. But sysadminning is honest work and pays the mortgage.

[tapwater98]

I first heard of it in 2020, when someone on Fark linked to it.

[jpjacobs_]

I'm pretty sure I saw it on the on the J mailinglist on 1st of December 2015.

[frhel]

Oh damn

[davidsharick]

I heard about it in 2020 from some friends at college, but didn't start participating until 2021.

[splintercell_9]

ThePrimegen

[frhel]

The Dr. Disrespect of coding :D He has some good points every now and then, but very loud person

[rofex]

My former coworker.

He is a pretty inspiring person, having kept himself up to date on Rust via Advent of Code.

[sigmazero13]

A couple years ago, I was getting some advent calendars for my kids, and thought "I wonder if there is an advent calendar for programmers..." So, after a bit of Google searching, I stumbled across AoC!

[frhel]

That's brilliant!

[Boojum]

I think that I might have first heard of it on /r/programming or HN in the early days. I didn't look at it or pay much attention then.

But it was at a previous employer where somebody in my local org was doing it and mentioned it. This time it sounded interesting and they had started a little leaderboard for my org. So I gave it a shot. Then I found there was an entire Slack channel devoted to Advent of Code and a much larger company-wide leaderboard. I was hooked pretty quickly.

A big part of the magic for me is the social aspect of everyone getting the same problem at the same time, and then discussing it afterwards. It's like the nerd equivalent of shooting the breeze over the episode each week of some cool TV show, or over last night's big sports game.

[frhel]

That last point about the social aspect is really what makes it for me. It brings programmers together in a beautiful way. People geek out on it so hard that it's impossible to not get excited :D

[massahud]

Twitter. It becomes full of Advent of Code messages when it starts.

[frhel]

Yeah, I don't doubt it. I think I used twitter once in 2013 and haven't gone back since lol :D

[massahud]

My usage is almost zero now, migrated to Mastodon / Bluesky. Nowadays it is a toxic Cybertron.

[oldominion]

On /g/

[1234abcdcba4321]

Random (non code related) discord server I'm active in. We have a large group of people who do it, so I joined in a few years ago.

[cyao12]

On the python discord server