December brings a flurry (heh) of “technical” advent calendars, each offering unique daily challenges to help folks sharpen their skills during the extended holiday season.

Programming Challenges

The cornerstone of technical advent calendars is Advent of Code, which unlocks new programming puzzles daily at midnight EST. These challenges can be solved in any programming language, making them accessible to developers of all backgrounds. You can win prizes if solve the puzzles in Kotlin or Rust, too! JetBrains also has a very friendly “Advent of Code in Rust for the Rest of Us” companion post.

For those interested in systems programming, Advent of Rust provides daily challenges specifically designed to help developers master Rust’s unique features like ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes.

Python folk may be interested in Computer Science UK’s (CSUK) Advent Coding Challenge.

Folks unfortunate enough to still be using C# may like the C# Advent Calendar (but, I mean, c’mon…use this month to try coding in a real language!).

Old school coders will likely enjoy the Perl Advent Calendar.

Web Development Focus

Advent of JavaScript delivers daily challenges with complete HTML and CSS scaffolding, letting developers focus purely on JavaScript implementation. Its companion series, Advent of CSS, has challenges that include all the assets you need to get started, including a Figma file, a style guide, a brief, and steps to kickstart each day.

There is also a separate Advent of JS challenge, which is pretty neat as you code up all the challengers right on their site. (There’s a similar one with the same idiom.)

The Advent of Svelte takes an interesting twist this year, with the Svelte team releasing daily improvements to their framework and ecosystem rather than presenting challenges.

Security and Data

Advent of Cyber offers beginner-friendly security exercises following an engaging Christmas narrative. Each task includes comprehensive written content and video tutorials, making it an excellent entry point for those interested in cybersecurity.

For query-oriented folks, Advent of SQL presents daily Christmas-themed SQL challenges, targeting intermediate-level practitioners with 10-20 minute exercises using PostgreSQL.

Alternative Approaches

Hack Slovakia has a set of 24 unconventional math and computer science problems that are sure to keep you noggin’ occupied.

Advent of No-Code takes a unique approach, challenging participants to build something new daily without writing code (sort of…it has you use AI codegen), with each challenge designed to take just 10 minutes.

QENU Advent Calendar may be from previous years, but it’s kind of fun actually opening a surprise “door” to see what’s inside.

If you just want to have some thoughtful fun vs. write more code, Advent of Chess has you covered pretty well.

And, if you just want to play whilst channeling a good ol’ Adobe Flash vibe Santa Games may be your cup of tea.

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FIN

We all will need to get much, much better at sensitive comms, and Signal is one of the only ways to do that in modern times. You should absolutely use that if you are doing any kind of community organizing (etc.). Ping me on Mastodon or Bluesky with a “🦇?” request (public or faux-private) and I’ll provide a one-time use link to connect us on Signal.

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