blog post: Advent of Code 2024 recap

Author: SethTisue

blog/_posts/2025-01-15-advent-of-code-recap.md

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+---
+layout: blog-detail
+post-type: blog
+by: Jamie Thompson and Seth Tisue, Scala Center
+title: Recap of Advent of Code 2024
+description: A recap of how the Scala Community participated in the recent 2024 Advent of Code challenge
+---
+
+Happy New Year everyone!
+
+**[Advent of Code](https://adventofcode.com/)**, started by [Eric Wastl](http://was.tl/), is a yearly event providing daily programming puzzles between December 1st and December 25th.
+
+Following on from [last year's blog post](https://scala-lang.org/blog/2024/01/10/advent-of-code-recap.html), 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][discord] and on [our solutions website][sc-advent-of-code].
+
+## Why we do this
+
+At the [Scala Center](https://scala.epfl.ch), 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][sc-advent-of-code], newcomers can see that programming in Scala is an elegant way to solve problems. As a follow up, we aim to make this website more visible, or at least a selection from it, as a showcase for newcomers ("Scala by example").
+
+## 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][discord]. 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][sc-advent-of-code] 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](https://github.com/AvaPL), who was the only participant to submit a solution for all 25 days, and [Raphaël Marbeck](https://github.com/rmarbeck), 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 22 completed articles, plus we expect to fill in the missing three soon. 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][sc-advent-of-code].
+
+## 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!
+
+[sc-advent-of-code]: https://scalacenter.github.io/scala-advent-of-code/2024/
+[discord]: https://discord.com/invite/scala