[Анонс] Advent of Code 2020: we solve together with the contour developers

December is a time of anticipation for Christmas. In the west, these 24 days even have a special name – advent… Ordinary people during this period buy advent calendars and brighten up the anticipation of the holidays with sweets. And the developers have come up with something more interesting – Advent of Code!

What is this movement?

On the night of December 1, a 25-day mission to save Christmas from Eric Vastle – the creator of Vanilla JS and other cool stuff for frontend developers and not only. Advent has been held every year since 2015 in the “one day – one task” format.

It turns out that only front-end developers can participate?

No. Tasks are not tied to any programming language at all. Usually the answer is a number or string. So you can code on your favorite stack, on the one that you wanted to try for a long time (even Excel).

And what kind of puzzles?

Each task has a captivating description and a couple of examples that clarify the conditions. You need to calculate the answer and enter it in the input field. If the answer is correct, the second part of the problem opens, which slightly complicates the first.

Usually tasks are united by a common history – which one this year is still unknown.

So, how hardcore is it?

Eric Wastl, makes sure that the entry barrier is low – even a beginner can write a tolerably working implementation.

On the other hand, each competition gathers several thousand participants and provides an opportunity to compete with powerful rivals. The battle in the top is usually difficult – the decision time affects the victory points, so the fastest developers become the leaders of Advent, who click on tasks in a few minutes after they are opened.

It turns out that you won’t be able to win?

The main leaderboard is just the tip of Advent. As a rule, participants are united in groups with private leaderboards and compete with each other. To some extent, it is much more interesting to beat a friend from a neighboring project than an abstract guy from Reddit.

Well, what has the Kontur got to do with it?

Kontur members participate in AoC annually, but in 2020 we decided to share experience and fun for the first time through daily video analysis of tasks. We will livecode in the evenings on the YouTube channel “Technologies in the Contour”… Right now we have five guaranteed members, so we will definitely release five vidos. Well, if it does, we will continue to go out with parsing until the very end of Advent. The first analysis will be released a few hours after the opening of the contest – we expect it to happen on the evening of December 1. In order not to miss the announcements, you need to subscribe to the competition channel in Telegram… To him have a chat to discuss ideas and solutions.

But that’s not all. So that Russian-speaking AoC participants can compete with each other, we have created a private leaderboard. To get there, just log in on the AoC website and add it to list of private leaderboards by code 428869-77ed0599

Will it be interesting for sure?

Yes. Even if you have never participated in something like this, this is a great option to try. And there it is not far from the ICFP Contest 🙂 Well, if you are already familiar with the format, then this is a good way to find like-minded people in Russia.

So, again, what to do right now?

Subscribe to the telegram channel, register in the contest and add to our private leaderboard, join to chatif you want to chat with the participants, and wait for December 1, when the first task appears.

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