Congrats to our 2024 Advent of Code Winners!
Lots of tickets handed out to the 2025 Carolina Code Conference
It’s our 2nd year running a private board for Advent of Code to let people win tickets to the 2025 Carolina Code Conference and we plan to keep this up. This year we had 25 participants earn at least 1 star and a 4 way tie for 1st place with 4 participants earning all 50 stars!
An assortment of languages were utilized by participants this year, including Kotlin, Nim, Gleam, Guile Scheme, Rust, Python, TypeScript Go and JavaScript!
We didn’t have any entries for Best Visualization this year and only one participant who decided to annoy their followers on our behalf on LinkedIn and Instagram, so that means the tickets for YouTube and X still remain unclaimed as well.
With those unclaimed tickets and a 4 way tie for first place, we’re going to hand out some bonus tickets this year to balance things out.
Here are your Winners!
Tied for 1st Place
With all 50 stars we have Colter, Niashi, Todd Ginsberg and Ethan McGee. Now, our prize pool was supposed to include THREE tickets for 1st place, TWO for 2nd place and ONE for third place, bringing the pool total to SIX tickets split among 4 people. To make sure that we can do this evenly, we’re going to add the TWO unclaimed social media tickets to the pool. That will allow each 1st place finisher to receive TWO tickets!
Polyglot Raffle
We had 4 entries into our Polyglot Raffle from participants who decided to try solving problems in different languages.
Robert Hodges with Java + Python
Colter with Nim + Python
Russell Brinson with Python + Guile Scheme
Madav Kumar with Gleam + Clojure + Nim
After putting all of the entries into our randomizer, the raffle winner is…Colter! Add ONE more ticket to the pile!
Social Media Raffle
This should be the easiest way to win tickets but again, we saw the lowest participation. I don’t know what we have to do to get y’all shilling for us on social media but hopefully we can figure it out next year to get more participation here.
Robert Hodges made posts and tagged us on both LinkedIn and Instagram, which wins him TWO easy tickets for as the only participant in the social media raffle. Congrats Robert!
Judges Rulings
Weirdest Language
Typically, we rely on the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey to evaluate language popularity. The lower on the chart you go, the weirder the choice is considered. This year, we have 3 entries truly worthy of Weirdest Language consideration.
Nim - Colter and Madav Kumar
Gleam - Eric Burden and Madav Kumar
Clojure - Madav Kumar
Guile Scheme - Russell Brinson
In the 2024 rankings, Clojure is 15th to last while Nim is next to last on our chart. Two other entries, Gleam and Guile Scheme, didn’t make the chart at all!
So I’m left with making a judges ruling between Gleam and Guile Scheme. While I’m thrilled to see people taking up Gleam after our excellent closing presentation on the language last year, I’ve got to go with the numbers.
Two participants picked Gleam and only one selected Guile Scheme…the weirdest language has to go to Guile Scheme! Congrats Russell!
Arbitrary Judges Pick - Embracing the Weird Polyglot
Since we didn’t have any entries for Best Visualization this year, that leaves me with more more ticket to give away. This year, we saw a new participant embrace both the Polyglot aspect of this contest AND the Weirdest Language aspect.
With that in mind, I’d like to give our last ticket to Madav Kumar!
Discounted and Early Access Tickets
All 14 participants who completed at least 10 stars will get early access and a 20% discount on tickets for tickets to the 2025 Carolina Code Conference in the form of a 1 year paid subscription to our substack blog! Winners, please contact me via email at barry@carolina.codes to claim your free subscription!
Final Ticket Totals
3 Tickets | Colter - Tied 1st, Polyglot Raffle
2 Tickets | Niashi - Tied 1st
2 Tickets | Todd Ginsberg - Tied 1st
2 Tickets | Ethan McGee - Tied 1st
2 Tickets | Robert Hodges - Social LinkedIn + Instagram
1 Ticket | Russell Brinson - Weird Language Guile Scheme
1 Ticket | Madav Kumar - Embracing the Weird Polyglot
Quick Thoughts About the 2025 Contest
As you all know, we try a lot of different things here at that Carolina Code Conference. Experimentation is really core to what we do as software developers and the conference tries to embrace that.
This year, we just published the code to join the Private Leaderboard rather than asking each participant to email me to get the private code. On the plus side, we had a little more participation. On the minus side, I don’t have a path to communicate with several people who are on the board.
Without a good communication channel, I couldn’t send out a participant survey or ask for clarification around several entries. At the end of the contest, I always send communications to participants to ask about specific entries for our various contests. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do that this year. The direct links that Advent of Code gives me to repos for participants who signed in with Github were a big part of me being able to even review the entries at all this year.
Next year, we will go back to direct email communication for people who wish to participate. If you felt like you had a good entry for one of these categories and want to make sure it is considered, please send me an email at barry@carolina.codes.
We had some requests for the Best Code Comment and Best Single Line of Code again in this year’s contest. We’ll definitely bring that back for the 2025 AoC!
Stay Tuned
I know news has trickled out slowly over the fall, but we’re ramping up for Carolina Code Conference 2025. Call for Speakers, Sponsors and some more news will be coming in days ahead!