Dear friends of Lambda Island,

It’s that time of year again, the time of Advent of Code, daily programming puzzles to help hone your skills, or just to try out for funsies.

Last year we didn’t participate in Advent of Code, but instead did our own Advent of Parens, where we posted a new blog post every day for 24 days straight.

This year we are participating in Advent of Code, and we’re streaming it live on our Youtube channel. If you have been thirsting for new Lambda Island video content then consider it an early Christmas present. These videos are live and off the cuff. Instead of doing the polished and produced videos you find on Lambda Island, these are direct and unedited.

The upside of that is that you can see Arne’s workflow and thinking process in realtime. If the interactive aspect of Clojure development (sometimes called “REPL-driven”) is something you haven’t fully absorbed yet then it might be particularly interesting to see how that works in practice.

The videos from day 1, day 2, and day 3 are already up, and soon after this email goes out we’ll start the live stream for day 4. Make sure to subscribe to the channel if you don’t want to miss it.

We’ve also set up a private leaderboard on Advent Of Code for Lambda Island subscribers, use the code 220047-9470b6af to see how others are doing.

We know it’s been quiet here, but behind the scenes a lot has been happening. Gaiwan, the company that makes Lambda Island, has grown significantly in the last few months. We are now a team of five, which is very exciting!

Alys has been working steadily on the Kaocha test runner, our flagship open source project. Ariel and Mitesh have made several improvements to the app which powers the Clojurians Slack log, and Felipe is freshening up the Lambda Island site, for a modern, fresh, and accessible experience. We hope to tell you all a lot more about these things in future blog posts and newsletters.

Thank you for supporting Lambda Island! Your subscriptions are invaluable in allowing us to continue doing open source, community initiatives, and free content like the Youtube channel. Besides getting a Lambda Island subscription you can also support us directly through our Open Collective.