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+---
+title: Advent of Code from a community event organizer's perspective
+description: "A look into what went on under the hood to pull off the Python Discord celebration of Advent of Code 2020."
+author: "Janine (Kutiekatj9)"
+date: 2021-03-24
+featured_image: "/post/advent-of-code-from-a-community-event-organizers-perspective/cover.png"
+---
+
+
+## What is Advent of Code?
+
+Advent of Code is one of Python Discord's favorite events that happens each
+year. An [Advent
+Calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_calendar?ref=blog.pythondiscord.com)
+of small programming puzzles that are released each day from December 1st to
+December 25th. The puzzles can be solved in any language, although we're
+obviously partial to the python solutions. The problems are designed for a
+variety of skill sets and skill levels, but it overall it gets harder as it
+goes on. If you want to find out more about the event, you can take a look
+here: https://adventofcode.com/about
+
+## How Python Discord participates
+
+All of us at Python Discord love Advent of Code. It's a great event that gets
+people to learn, improve, and/or flex their coding skills with a community
+event. We see a lot of people learn about new ways to accomplish fun and
+interesting puzzles. Regex? Vim shortcuts and macros? Brute forcing with
+powershell? All different solutions our server members have come up with.
+
+Part of how we engage our server is by having a community leaderboard that can
+be viewed in server. It pulls the data from the Advent of Code leaderboard
+itself, creates a fun and engaging environment.
+
+
+## The Curse and Blessing of Server Growth
+
+I stepped into the Event Lead role 3 weeks before December 1st. Not a whole lot
+of time, but we've run the event before so the prep shouldn't be too bad. I
+spent the first week just getting acquainted with how the previous Advent of
+Code was run and reading through any of the feedback we received. I also spent
+some time getting familiar with Advent of Code itself! This was the first time
+I had ever heard of it, nevermind participated.
+
+Fun fact about Advent of Code: an individual leaderboard has a limit of 200
+people. I was curious about how many people we had the previous year. After
+some digging in archived channels and pestering our admins, I found out that
+the 2019 Python Discord leaderboard had 177 people on it. The server in
+December 2019 had 30,000 people in it. At the time of planning the 2020 AoC
+event, we had over 100,000 members.
+
+Time for some back-of-the-envelope math! 2019 had 177 participants with 30,000
+people. Let's assume the % participation rate (0.0059 participants/server
+member) stays the same year to year. From that ratio and applying it with our
+current server size, we should expect roughly 590 people who want to join the
+Python Discord leaderboard for the 2020 event. Ah, here lies the rub:
+leaderboards are capped at 200 people.
+
+## Plan A
+
+I contacted the wonderful Advent of Code organizers to see if we could get an
+increase for our leadboard. I asked (2 weeks away from the event) if they could
+increase it and unfortunately it wasn't technically feasible at that time.
+
+... Time for Plan B!
+
+## Plan B
+
+It's clear we need multiple leaderboards. One thing the admin team and I agreed
+on was that we still wanted one combined leaderboard for the server as a whole.
+Having a cohesive and non-fragmented community is important to us, especially
+for events that we encourage beginners to join. But we can't get really not
+have multiple leaderboards, so the next step was to hack together the
+leaderboards into one combined one. We knew we needed to update `@Sir Lancebot`
+to grab the information from all the the various leaderboards we have (which
+all have different session cookies that are required to access information
+through the API), combine it into one leaderboard, and then *re-score the
+entire leaderboard*. This has to happen everytime we need an update to the
+leaderboard.  (AoC organizers, if you're reading this don't worry! We had a
+cooldown for when we would actually query the API.)
+
+Also, we realized we had to do all this a week before the event: code it, test
+it, review it, and deploy it. Not a great start for the first event I was
+officially leading.
+
+One of our wonderful owners Sebastiaan stayed up late several nights to get the
+code working with caches, cooldowns, re-scoring logic, and the actual
+displaying of the leaderboard. December 1st, midnight Eastern US time, we saw
+our leaderboard go live! Overall the event was a great success. 447 people in
+the server completed at least one day and a substantial amount completed all
+the puzzles as well. I don't think we would've seen such great engagement
+throughout the event without the combined leaderboard. A lot of the
+1-hour-after-puzzle-release conversation was comparing positions on the
+leaderboard, solutions, and talking about different approaches to the puzzle.
+
+
+## Takeaways
+
+- You can never start planning too early!
+- Advent of Code is a great experience and a great event to help strengthen
+  community. Definitely try it out in the future if you haven't.
+- Sebastiaan is a fantastic human being who deserves cookies~
+- Server growth is awesome, but you've got to be prepared for what that brings.