It's Advent, the time of year when we countdown the days to Christmas having fun doing daily coding challenges. Advents, in the programming sense, are events hosting programming puzzles announced every day till Christmas, aimed at a variety of skill levels.

While there are dedicated Advents say for Perl, Java or even SQL, there's the all encompassing Advent of Code that sports puzzles that can be solved in any programming language.

That Advent of Code has by now established itself as a household name and annual habit, attracting massive interest. However, this year it won't run for the full 24 days till Christmas but for only 12. That's because Eric Wastl, the host, devotes a lot of time to working out the puzzles and as we all know time is limited and precious.

That's not the only change happening this year, however. Eric also removed the global leaderboard because  people were taking it too seriously, leading to many believing that they're not good programmers because they didn't score fast times when solving the puzzles. Haters also resorted to DDOS-ing the site!

So anyway, what's in stock for this year? We will start to find out today, December 1st, and we can expect the usual Christmas-themed puzzles, like the very first one of last year, adhering to the following structure:

--Setting the scene:
Upon pouring into the office, everyone confirms that the Chief Historian is indeed nowhere to be found. Instead, the Elves discover an assortment of notes and lists of historically significant locations!

....

Throughout the Chief's office, the historically significant locations are listed not by name but by a unique number called the location ID. To make sure they don't miss anything, The Historians split into two groups, each searching the office and trying to create their own complete list of location IDs.

--Setting the problem:
There's just one problem: by holding the two lists up side by side (your puzzle input), it quickly becomes clear that the lists aren't very similar. Maybe you can help The Historians reconcile their lists?

--Setting the instructions:
For example:

3 4
4 3
2 5
1 3
3 9
3 3

Maybe the lists are only off by a small amount! To find out, pair up the numbers and measure how far apart they are. Pair up the smallest number in the left list with the smallest number in the right list, then the second-smallest left number with the second-smallest right number, and so on.

....

Fun and challenging!

As said you can solve the puzzles in any language you seem fit. If you're on Rust however, there's a handy lightweight template to help you start solving the puzzles in Rust using JetBrains's RustRover IDE.

If you're on Kotlin there's also a template for it and in addition JetBrains is also hosting five livestreams on December 1–5 where you get to solve the puzzles in Kotlin with help from Kotlin team experts and fun community guests. Full links bellow.

To conclude, Advent of Code and its specialized counterparts are a way for programmers to have fun, hone their skills and learn something new - in sharp contract to the latest trend of GenAI and Vibe coding.

Sharpen your keyboards!

More Information

Advent Of Code 2025

Advent of Code Kotlin Template
Template for solving Advent of Code puzzles in Rust with RustRover   

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