blog post: Advent of Code 2024 recap

blog/_posts/2025-01-16-advent-of-code-recap.md

@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+---
+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.
+
+## 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 24 completed articles. 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