Welcome everyone to the 2023 advent of code! Thank you all for stopping by and participating in it in programming.dev whether youre new to the event or doing it again.

This is an unofficial community for the event as no official spot exists on lemmy but ill be running it as best I can with Sigmatics modding as well. Ill be running a solution megathread every day where you can share solutions with other participants to compare your answers and to see the things other people come up with

Day 1: Trebuchet?!

Megathread guidelines

• Keep top level comments as only solutions, if you want to say something other than a solution put it in a new post. (replies to comments can be whatever)
• Code block support is not fully rolled out yet but likely will be in the middle of the event. Try to share solutions as both code blocks and using something such as https://topaz.github.io/paste/ or pastebin (code blocks to future proof it for when 0.19 comes out and since code blocks currently function in some apps and some instances as well if they are running a 0.19 beta)

FAQ

• What is this?: Here is a post with a large amount of details: https://programming.dev/post/6637268
• Where do I participate?: https://adventofcode.com/
• Is there a leaderboard for the community?: We have a programming.dev leaderboard with the info on how to join in this post: https://programming.dev/post/6631465

🔒This post will be unlocked when there is a decent amount of submissions on the leaderboard to avoid cheating for top spots

🔓 Edit: Post has been unlocked after 6 minutes

Hey everyone! Thought I would do a post ahead of the event to cover the major topics that will probably come up

What is Advent of Code?

Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

Each day will have two different puzzles that must be solved in order (you get access to the second after solving the first). Each puzzle has the same backstory but each person has different input they get for that puzzle.

Puzzles are released every day at midnight ET and can be completed anytime after they are released (but people who solve them quicker after theyre been released get more points for the site leaderboard)

(Puzzles are on https://adventofcode.com/)

What can I post here?

Anything relating to the event! Whether that be a meme, asking for help, sharing solutions, etc.

How should I format my post titles?

Try to keep titles in this general format:

[help, etc. category if applicable] [YEAR Day # (Part X)] [programming language if applicable] Post Title

For example:

[2023 Day #5 (Part 3)] [Rust] My attempt at a solution

Another example:

[Help] [2023 Day #2] What does this sentence mean

This helps people avoid spoilers and lets people use it as an archive by searching if they find out about the event in the middle and are starting from the beginning then

Should I post in the solution thread or separately?

If its just a solution try to keep it in the solution megathread so the community doesn't get spammed with solutions! If you add something onto that such as a doing a visualization, making it a meme, or etc. though feel free to post it separately

What can I post in the solution megathread?

The top level comments in the solution megathread should be solutions to that day. If you want to write something that is not a solution feel free to make a new post about it.

Any replies to top level comments though can be whatever

Lemmy-UI doesn't handle code blocks well, what do I do?

I pushed an update to lemmy-ui that adds code block support that will be arriving to all instances in version 0.19. This is currently in release clients and I expect it to release in the middle of the event.

For now though feel free to mirror any code you post onto some other site such as pastebin. if you can try to do both code blocks and pastebin to future proof it for when 0.19 eventually drops

To make a code block make three backticks, make a new line and put the code on lines, then put a newline and do three backticks on that

e.g.

```
console.log('Hello World')
```

becomes

console.log('Hello World')  

If your instance decided to beta test 0.19 you might be able to see code blocks already on the site, I put a code block above and in the sidebar so if one of those renders for you you have code block support

If youre using an app instead of the site though this section does not apply to you and depends on whether the developer of your app has added code block support or not

This week we have advent of code as our community of the week! Advent of code is an annual event that happens every december with a programming challenge released every day. The website where its run is https://adventofcode.com/ . Feel free to discuss things about the event, ask questions about it, post your solutions, post memes relating to it, etc. in the community

Top Posts

• Advent of code is approaching!
• Let's just get this one out of the way...
• What programming language will you be using in the upcoming advent of code?

[email protected]

For anyone interested, advent of code is about to start! (first puzzles dropping at midnight ET which is in around 11 hours)

We have a community in the instance at [email protected] for discussion about the event and that will have solution threads where you can post and compare against other people

Advent of code is a programming puzzle advent calendar where new puzzles drop every day until the 25th. They can be done in any language and puzzles are released on the AoC site

https://adventofcode.com/

First puzzles dropping at midnight ET, ill be making a solutions thread a bit after it drops after the leaderboard fills up a bit

Added a couple more buttons so you can see active communities from all connected instances as well

In addition youll see that the active users today is much larger values due to the site & community stats update I did in the instance where it now takes into account post and comment likes in addition to post and comment creations

(Note this and other updates wont be pushed out to the beta site likely until after 0.19 releases and the instance updates to it since ive been messing with the new authentication system)

Starting up a new monthly post where I look at the communities in the instance to see how well all of them are doing

From this we should be able to see what communities are struggling so that they can be focused on for adding activity across the instance

My goal for december will be increasing the amount of communities that appear in the active and moderate sections and will compare to see the activity change then

For community activity levels im breaking this into 5 categories (note these stats are based on the new users/month stats in the instance)

• Lively- 5k users/month or above
• Active - 201-4999 users/month
• Moderate - 51-200 users/month
• Quiet - 11-50 users/month
• Dead - 0-10

Communities in each category

• Lively communities: 2 (1%)
• Active communities: 11 (6%)
• Moderate communities: 27 (15%)
• Quiet communities: 45 (25%)
• Dead communities: 92 (52%)

Most active communities

• [email protected] (7.4k users/month)
• [email protected] (5.12k)
• [email protected] (1.37k)
• [email protected] (1.3k)
• [email protected] (1.09k)
• [email protected] (1.02k)
• [email protected] (974)
• [email protected] (816)
• [email protected] (786)
• [email protected] (782)

Least active communities

(These are ones that will be prioritized for making active) (theres a lot in the dead category so these are random ones from that, not all of them)

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

One other community that should be interesting to see the growth is the advent of code community as that is about to start

[email protected]

currently at 136 but I assume thats going to grow much larger

Hey everyone, I just pushed a change that changes how active users/month, etc. is calculated

In Pangora I've swapped this to include both post and comment likes to more accurately reflect activity in addition to the default things it counts (By default it only counts people who have posted a post or a comment but thats not everyone who is active in the community) (Its not counting people who have looked at the community but not voted or posted but its closer than before to getting most activity).

To line the instance up to pangora functionality and since I can do this without needing to touch the code I made it follow how pangora calculates it.

users/day on some community gives a tally of all users that have done one of the following in the past 24 hours in that community:

• posted a post
• posted a comment
• voted on a post
• voted on a comment

The community stats have already been updated and the instance-wide ones should update soon next time it recalculates the stats

(note these stats only show in the instance since each instance calculates their own set of stats for all communities. If youre looking at a community in this instance from another instance the old stats will show. However this also means that communities in other instances when viewed in this instance show the new stats)

Hey everyone! been a bit since I ran my last AMA so am running a new one. Feel free to throw down some questions below and ill answer them. (my AMAs are more asynchonous but everyone should get answers)

I'm a student in university and typically do both web and game development. Youll likely have seen me in the instance doing things related to community management to make sure things are running smoothly

Pangora is the name of the programming.dev lemmy fork thats been getting built up slowly with pangora-ui being the new frontend being made (very early alpha is up at https://beta.pangora.social/ and community on programming.dev is at [email protected] )

Other misc topics I can answer about: I compose music & make pixel art, my favorite games are minecraft, SCP:SL, everhood, battlerite, and metal slug 3, and recent games ive been playing are Mistward, Revita, and Puzzmo

Pushed an update to https://beta.pangora.social/ that has the changes ive made to the site since the last alpha

Updates include:

• Lists of active and new communities on the sidebar
• Community names can have custom gradients
• The post feeds works with javascript disabled
• The posts in the post feed now have less transparency and the background on the post previews have less transparency
• The post previews have been centered more
• The URL now changes to match the post when looking at a post preview
• A system theme has been added to the theme switcher and should be set by default
• The icons in the post feed scope & sort buttons now are not trapped inside the button
• The community view now allows you to sort posts
• You can now view posts from multiple communities
• code block text size has been made larger (might not work for comments)

Viewing posts from multiple communities

You can view posts from multiple communities at once by setting them all in the url. Separate each community by a plus.

for example https://beta.pangora.social/c/programming+opensource will show you posts from both programming and opensource

If you want to add in a community in another instance add it in in the format community@domain

e.g. https://beta.pangora.social/c/[email protected][email protected]

Wildcard

You can put a wildcard (star symbol *) instead of the instance domain to search for that community name in all instances

• note that this will only pull from the biggest instances for now due to limitations from this being only in the frontend currently

e.g. https://beta.pangora.social/c/programming@* will get all communities named programming in different instances

Wildcard instance exceptions

You can make a wildcard ignore a certain instance by first adding a minus sign after the wildcard (-) to mark a new rule, then an exclamation mark (!) to mark a negation, and then the instance domain

e.g. https://beta.pangora.social/c/programming@*-!programming.dev-!lemmy.zip will get all communities named programming in different instances except for the ones in programming.dev and lemmy.zip

Composition

You can combine the above as much as you want to get complex queries. You may run into rate limits if you add an extremely large amount of communities though

Example Query

WARNING

This is implemented only in the frontend currently so certain aspects will be broken

Hot and active sorts for multiple communities will not work

Added in some sections on the right side of the screen in the home page that shows the 5 most active communities, and the 5 most recently made communities

This is essentially the equivalent of the trending communities section in lemmy-ui but isnt using the severely broken hot community sort

Section in lemmy ui below

Also you might notice that some communities now have different gradient colors. I added in support for different community gradients and set some values for some of them. (Note this is all hardcoded into the frontend current until I touch the backend).

It also affects the colors of the community names in post feeds such as is done below

As well I made the site sidebar card and the new community list sidebar cards show information when javascript is disabled. Ill be going through and trying to make that happen for as many things as possible

The site theme now also follows prefers-color-scheme by default

Ill likely be changing how the home feed is handled a bit so that it can support javascript being disabled before I push things out to beta.pangora.social