A great way to learn Dart and have fun in the process

Happy Christmas! This year’s Advent of Code is over, and it was tremendous fun as always. I’ve enjoyed doing the (easier) challenges over the years, but this year we thought it would be fun to have a private leaderboard for Dart entries.

This was a spur of the moment thing on our part, and we launched it just with a tweet:

Tim Sneath on Twitter: “Let’s do this! If you want to participate in Advent of Code 2022 with Dart, join our private leaderboard: https://t.co/EsxBFTj5rLUse code 1671198-6c003f39. Who knows, we might even find some swag for the most committed! #AdventOfCode2022 @dart_lang #Flutter / Twitter”

Let’s do this! If you want to participate in Advent of Code 2022 with Dart, join our private leaderboard: https://t.co/EsxBFTj5rLUse code 1671198-6c003f39. Who knows, we might even find some swag for the most committed! #AdventOfCode2022 @dart_lang #Flutter

We had some great participation from all over the world, with nearly 150 people signing up to join us.

The team at Invertase got in on the fun, and kindly offered to send some swag to the top five entrants. Lots of folk had fun:

Peter Aleksander Bizjak on Twitter: “My #AdventOfCode solutions are looking like I’m transforming Dart into Haskell. It’s awesome using the language for something else than just Flutter. Nothing wrong with Flutter, but I feel like Dart was made for challenges like that. Having so much fun! / Twitter”

My #AdventOfCode solutions are looking like I’m transforming Dart into Haskell. It’s awesome using the language for something else than just Flutter. Nothing wrong with Flutter, but I feel like Dart was made for challenges like that. Having so much fun!

Jeevan Joshi on Twitter: “#AdventOfCode is getting interesting, This year I am competing on the #Dart side.Glad to be on the top leaderboard, and I hope I’ll maintain the momentum. https://t.co/NFa8oDZZQE / Twitter”

AdventOfCode is getting interesting, This year I am competing on the #Dart side.Glad to be on the top leaderboard, and I hope I’ll maintain the momentum. https://t.co/NFa8oDZZQE

The winner was Meï (@meixdev), who just pipped second-place Darren Austin from our own Flutter team at the finishing line. Meï is in France, so had to get up at 6am each morning to start the challenge as each day was released.

Meï on Twitter: “It’s a 1-point lead! I can’t claim all the fame as it wouldn’t have happened without the fast skills of tons of others.It was so much fun ! Hope we will meet again for next year’s AoC ! 💪 / Twitter”

It’s a 1-point lead! I can’t claim all the fame as it wouldn’t have happened without the fast skills of tons of others.It was so much fun ! Hope we will meet again for next year’s AoC ! 💪

Some people tried using ChatGPT to build their Dart solutions, which was an interesting approach, but ultimately unsuccessful.

Particularly fun is that many folk published their solutions to GitHub, making it easy to compare different approaches. Here are some of the winning Dart repos:

GitHub – MeixDev/Advent-of-Code2022: AoC2022
GitHub – darrenaustin/advent-of-code-dart: Darren’s solutions to the Advent of Code puzzles in Dart.
GitHub – imaNNeoFighT/adventofcod_2022
GitHub – ndelanou/advent_of_code: https://adventofcode.com/2022
GitHub – Mosc/advent-of-code-2022

It’s not too late to do the challenges, by the way. I’m planning to continue working away at my own solutions in spare time over the coming weeks, without the pressure of competition or it taking time away from my other programming hobby projects.

To close, I want to give a giant shout out and thank you to Eric Wastl, who is the creator of each year’s Advent of Code challenge. This is a tremendous amount of work each year: creating interesting challenges, building and maintaining site infrastructure, dealing with technical support questions and fending off malicious actors. He has given a lot of us a great deal of pleasure. If you’ve had some fun from Advent of Code this year, do send him a token of your appreciation, which will I’m sure be an encouragement for future years.