It's back! It's finally back! One of my favorite things on the internet is the yearly Advent of Code challenge. It's a programming challenge that runs from December 1st to December 25th. Each day, a new two-part puzzle is released. There is usually a plain text file input provided, and you have to write some code in any language you want to process it in some way. If you submit the correct answer to their question, you get a star. If you solve both parts correctly, you get two stars! The goal is to get 50 stars by Christmas day.

There are a bunch of people who get super-competitive and try to finish it as soon after midnight (when the puzzles are released) as possible. Personally, I just try to keep up and not get overwhelmed, since the second parts are usually pretty hard and require some algorithmic cleverness. (Or... and hear me out... some GPU compute. Just throw 1000 computers at the problem! 🙃)

In any case, what we usually do here on DEV is have a post here every day where members of the community can post their solutions so you can see how a bunch of different people approached it in a bunch of different languages. So, when you've solved that day's puzzle, please join in and comment with your solution. And, if you're not ready for spoilers yet, stay away from the comments section!

Every year there is a theme, and this year, you're going on vacation! The stars are currency that you need to pay for your room at the end of your stay. I'm sure nothing bad will happen. It rarely does on these Advent of Code adventures.

The Puzzle

Here's today's puzzle: apparently your trip expense report isn't adding up! You are tasked with hunting through your expense entries to find the two that add up to 2020 exactly. The answer is the result of multiplying those two values together. A nice warm-up puzzle to get us back into the groove this year.

The Leaderboard

If anyone is interested, I've generated a leaderboard code for a little less globally competitive DEV leaderboard.
It's not an officially sponsored DEV thing, just a leaderboard that some DEV peeps have used over the last couple of years. There's still quite a bit of room, so feel free to jump in if you'd like using this code:

Ryan's Leaderboard: 224198-25048a19

If you want to generate your own leaderboard and signal boost it a little bit, send it to me either in a DEV message or in a comment on one of these posts and I'll add it to the list above.

Previous Day's Languages

Last year, they made an effort to keep track of how many people used each language for their solutions for the previous day. I'll try to do that as time allows. I could imagine a bot that could poll each thread daily and update the following day's count. But that may be outside of what I have time for as well. If anybody wants to come up with something like that, I'm all for integrating it into the process. Otherwise, I'll do my best.

Merry Coding!