Advent of Code Ticket Winners!
Recap and results from #adventofcode
At the end of November we set out to have our first ever Advent of Code Ticket Challenge to give people a chance to win tickets to the 2024 Carolina Code Conference, while flexing their brains and having some fun in the process.
We set out to give away 22 tickets and ended up giving away 16 total across our participants!
Participant Surveys
We surveyed our participants for their entries and results and ended up with some solid feedback.
90% of survey respondents said they plan to participate again if we have another contest next year as well, so that’s a definite possibility.
60% of respondents said they were able to earn a Silver Star each day in under 1 hour, while everyone was able to under 3 hours.
Gold Stars were more challenging with half of respondents typically investing 3-5 hours in order to claim that prize.
“Super cool. I’m gonna keep practicing and bring it next year.” - Josh
This contest was assembled on fairly short notice and despite some significant social media pushes, probably wasn’t as widely communicated as it need to be. Stay tuned on that front.
Favorite Day
Most participants said that the Day 6 boat race was their favorite of the group, but day 3 gondola repair, day 4 figuring out scratchcards, day 8 in the haunted wasteland, and day 19 returning a stolen hang glider got some votes. Day 21 also got a vote, because some people just like to suffer.
“I enjoyed day 6 because I've got a math background and it was nice to be able to use those skills. I feel in over my head sometimes when I'm coding but, if math is involved, I'm in my element.” - Liz
Hardest Day
Day 3 on the gondola gear ratios and Day 21 counting the elf steps were tied for the hardest that really stretched people. There were definitely times when people may have been discouraged but pushed forward. Seeing so many other people struggle with you on social media is part of the fun.
“I liked day 21 because it stretched me which is the key to AOC. I don't want them all to be easy. I want to grow and learn and that's what AOC is all about to me. I had to learn a lot on this day…some math (quadratic equations while not new it was apply this to a coding problem that was tricky and novel to me) and also to look at the input and notice patterns plus visualizing it was key and I got to play around with matplot lib, extend my python knowledge as well. Lots of good learning opportunities on this day even though it took me two days to solve it.” - Chad
What did you Learn?
Participants learned all sorts of things during this process including Memoization, Golang, Kotlin, The Shoelace Formula to calculate the area of a polygon, Regular Expressions (Regex) for working with large text files, the joy of Python’s enumerate() and last but not least…patience.
Let’s See Your Winners!
We had several categories and prizes to give out here, so let’s see the winners from our private leaderboard!
Overall Leaderboard Winners
1st…and 2nd Place - We have a TIE! Nathan Binkley and Chad Bryant both completed EVERY single challenge for the maximum score of 50 stars! Well done!
Since there were 4 tickets for first place and 2 tickets for second place, we’re going to split the prize between the two of them and each will receive 3 tickets. Congratulations guys!
3rd Place - Eric Burden, who created so much momentum for this competition to happen, finishes in 3rd place with 46 total stars and wins a ticket to the 2024 Carolina Code Conference. I’d like to note that Eric did finish out and get all 50 stars eventually. Great work Eric!
“10/10, would recommend doubling up Advent of Beer and Advent of Code.” - Nathan
To put these accomplishments in perspective, you can look the public Advent of Code stats to see how many people participated and solved the puzzles each day. On day 1 over 300,000 people earned either a silver or gold star. By day 25 only 13,000 remained.
All participants are in very good company. Kudos.
Polyglot Raffle
If you used more than one programming language to earn a Gold star, you were automatically entered into our polyglot raffle. Every additional language used to earn a Gold star was another entry.
Congratulations to Russell Brinson! You won a free ticket to the 2024 Carolina Code Conference after using both Python and Haskell.
We saw 3 competitors in the polyglot raffle this year using a combination of Python, Go, Haskell and C# to solve this year’s challenges!
Judges Rulings
We also had some options for other important activities around the coding puzzles where you could submit an entry to win an one free ticket on each category.
Best Code Comments
Congratulations to Eric Burden for this code comment that will nearly bring a tear to your eye!
Best Single Line of Code
Congratulations to Russell Brinson for this doozy! It makes me both happy and sad at the same time.
# fully maintainable
print(len([(int("".join([i for i in list(map((lambda line : line.strip()), open("./day6.txt", "r").readlines()))[0][10:].split(" ") if i != ""])))*i for i in range(1,int("".join([i for i in list(map((lambda line : line.strip()), open("./day6.txt", "r").readlines()))[0][10:].split(" ") if i != ""]))) if ((int("".join([i for i in list(map((lambda line : line.strip()), open("./day6.txt", "r").readlines()))[0][10:].split(" ") if i != ""])))-i) * i > int("".join([i for i in list(map((lambda line : line.strip()), open("./day6.txt", "r").readlines()))[1][10:].split(" ") if i != ""]))]))Weirdest Language
Congratulations to Russell Brinson for solving a challenge with Haskell which was the most niche language used out of all participants according to the Stack Overflow developer survey!
Best Visualization
And after some recommendation we also decided to add another category for best visualization.
Congratulations to Chad Bryant for the matplotlib visualization of the Elf walking through the Maze for Day 21’s challenge!
Social Media Raffles
If you completed 20% of the challenges (10 of 50 stars) and engaged with us on social media you had the opportunity to enter into a social media raffle for each platform!
Here are your winners!
LinkedIn - Congratulations to Nathan Binkley!
Mastodon - Congratulations to Eric Burden!
YouTube & Instagram - Congratulations to Robert Hodges!
Paid Subscription Winners
Everyone who completed at least 10 out of 50 stars won a paid subscription to this blog for the next year. Although we don’t include much paid content, our paid subscribers get early access and discounted tickets before they become generally available.
Congratulations to each of you and great work!
T-Shirt Raffle Winners
Lastly, we had some extra inventory of our awesome Lyrical Code t-shirt from the 2023 conference and we’re raffling those off to any participants with at least 1 Gold Star. Although 12 participants earned a Gold star, these were entirely subject to availability of the size everyone wanted.
Congratulations to Liz Alvarez, Mike Nice, Nathan Binkley, Andy Vanasse, Joel Griffith, William Braun and Russell Brinson!
Also congratulations to Robert Hodges who qualified, but we just didn’t have anymore inventory in your size!
No Entries
Unfortunately, we didn’t have any participants submit entries for the following categories: Best DevOps Pipeline, Best Tests, Best Kanban Board, Best Security Practices. A single entry in any of these categories would have won…I hope this news doesn’t deeply haunt anyone between now and August…
Additionally, no entries for Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads on this year’s social media raffles. We have gone ahead and closed the Threads account and we’re planning to shutter the Facebook account as well due to lack of engagement on that platform. We just shared these details recently in a social media performance report.
That’s 7 tickets that we weren’t able to give away, so keep an eye on our social media channels for future opportunities to earn your ticket!
Congratulations!
Congratulations to all of our participants and winners!
Nathan Binkley - 4 tickets // Tied 1st Place, Social for LinkedIn
Chad Bryant - 4 tickets // Tied for 1st Place, Best Visualization
Eric Burden - 3 tickets // 3rd Place, Social for Mastodon, Best Code Comments
Russell Brinson - 3 tickets // Polyglot, Weirdest Language, Best Single Line
Robert Hodges - 2 tickets // Social for YouTube and Instagram
“I’m glad this is a thing. It was fun.” - Liz
Looking forward to seeing you all at the 2024 Carolina Code Conference!