The 2024 'Advent Calendars' Offering Programming Language Tips, Space Photos, and Memories

Not every tech "advent calendar" involves programming puzzles. Instead the geek tradition of programming-language advent calendars "seems to have started way back in 2000," according to one history, "when London-based programmer Mark Fowler launched a calendar highlighting a different Perl module each day."

So the tradition continues...

• Nearly a quarter of a century later, there's still a Perl Advent Calendar, celebrating tips and tricks like "a few special packages waiting under the tree that can give your web applications a little extra pep in their step."

• And of course there's a separate advent calendar for Raku programmers.

• Since 2009 web performance consultant (and former Yahoo and Facebook engineer) Stoyan Stefanov has been pulling together an annual Web Performance calendar with helpful blog posts.

• There's also a JVM Advent calendar with daily helpful hints for Java programmers.

• Another advent calendar promises daily posts about C#.

• The HTMHell site — which bills itself as "a collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites" — is celebrating the season with the "HTMHell Advent Calendar," promising daily articles on security, accessibility, UX, and performance.

• There's even an advent calendar with tips for the reverse-engineering framework Radar.

• There's still a lovely web-design themed calendar at Designcember.com.

And meanwhile developers at the Svelte frontend framework are actually promising to release something new each day, "whether it's a new feature in Svelte or SvelteKit or an improvement to the website!"

But not every tech advent calendar is about programming...

• Adafruit's managing director is publishing a Retrocomputing Advent Calendar — daily looks at the ghosts of computers past.

• The Atlantic continues its 17-year tradition of a Space Telescope advent calendar, featuring daily images from both NASA's Hubble telescope and James Webb Space Telescope

• The gaming blog Rock Paper Shotgun has been counting down their favorite games of 2024...

Email address harvesting

[jamienk]

Sometimes I find these fun and interesting, but I notice that many of them seem to require that I give my email address...? Why? To me, this signals an anti-web way of thinking, more of a commercial, entrepreneurial, business perspective than a Free, geeky way of being involved in the web.

Please stop doing things like this.

It's true that we all need and want money, but that doesn't mean we should flush our values.

Re:

[nightflameauto]

Sometimes I find these fun and interesting, but I notice that many of them seem to require that I give my email address...? Why? To me, this signals an anti-web way of thinking, more of a commercial, entrepreneurial, business perspective than a Free, geeky way of being involved in the web.

Please stop doing things like this.

It's true that we all need and want money, but that doesn't mean we should flush our values.

Did you not get the memo? Money is our values. Money is our moral compass. Money is our ethics. Greed is God. Fall in line, or get left behind!