Dear Ada Community,

We're thrilled to kick off the holiday season with the third edition of Advent of Ada, a programming challenge that tests your coding skills while contributing to a meaningful cause.

As many of you know, Advent of Code has become a beloved tradition since its inception in 2015. The concept is simple yet brilliant: from December 1st to 25th, every day a new small programming exercise is published on the adventofcode.com website. Participants get points for each completed exercise.

For the second time, we are providing a little extra motivation for participants using the Ada or SPARK programming languages. For each person completing one of the Advent of Code challenges using the Ada programming language, AdaCore will donate $10 to the Ada Developers Academy, up to a total of $5,000. And for those willing to go an extra mile, AdaCore will donate $20 if the solution is implemented in SPARK with at least proof of absence of run-time errors (a.k.a. Silver level).

How to participate?

A special thread on the ada-lang.io forum was created for anyone to get their solutions registered. Once you have completed an exercice, head over to that thread and post a message with a link to the sources of your solution using the following format:

[<pseudonym>][<day>][<Ada or SPARK>] <link to solution source code>

For instance, if I solve the 3rd day problem using Ada:

[Fabien-Chouteau][3][Ada] https://github.com/Fabien-Chou...…

And the 5th day using SPARK:

[Fabien-Chouteau][5][SPARK] https://github.com/Fabien-Chou...…

If you prefer, you can just have one post and edit it every time you solve a new problem.

• You don’t have to solve all the 25 problems

• You don’t have to solve the problems on the day they are submitted

• You can switch back and forth between Ada and SPARK

• You don’t have to be a beginner in Ada/SPARK. Advent of Code is great for learning new languages but it’s also fun for experienced programmers

Early January we will count all the submissions, and donate the corresponding amount to the Ada Developers Academy.

Happy hacking season!