Advent of Spin 2024 Wrap-up
Thorsten Hans & MacKenzie Adam
advent of spin
coding challenge
If you can believe it or not, we’re onto our 3rd consecutive year of Advent of Spin challenges! It’s been such a joy to celebrate and learn with the Spin community over the holiday season, and Advent of Spin 2024 was no exception. We received many submissions for the four challenges we released this year: a wishlist management system, a naughty-or-nice calculator, an AI-generated gift recommendation engine, and a scavenger hunt.
Let’s do a little recap shall we?
Challenge 1
For the first challenge, we asked you to build a wishlist app to help Santa and his elves keep track of presents. Not only did you add a festive frontend for Santa to interact with his wishlists (that’s a lot of requests to keep track of 🤭), but you also connected it to a key-value store to persist the data in case there were unexpected hiccups along the way.
Challenge 2
Each year, we’ve ramped up the difficulty a bit with Advent of Spin, and 2024 was no exception. This challenge invited participants to explore the component model, enabling polyglot development without requiring expertise in multiple languages (or WebAssembly). To test their skills, participants implemented a “naughty or nice” API scorer component in one language and seamlessly integrated it into a Rust-based application. Not to mention, participants had the opportunity to flex their philosophy skills to determine how someone is quantified as “naughty or nice” 🤔
You could return a simple hard-coded value (😢), you could randomize a value, or you could implement a custom logic to determine the naughty-or-nice score. Again, it’s up to you!
Challenge 3
Now, it wouldn’t be an Advent of Spin if we didn’t take our serverless AI feature for a Spin! This year, we put AI to work helping Santa come up with even better gift ideas. Based on just a few parameters—like name, age, and likes—your application generated the best gift suggestions it could! No manually provisioned GPUs or cold starts required thanks to Fermyon Cloud, making it fast, festive, and fun to build.
Input
{
"name": "Riley Parker",
"age" : 15,
"likes": "Computers, Programming, Mechanical Keyboards"
}
Recommendation
{
"name": "Riley Parker",
"giftSuggestions": "I bet Riley would be supper happy with a new low profile mechanical keyboard or a couple of new books about software engineering"
}
Challenge 4
Whew, by the time participants got to Challenge 4, they’d really gone above and beyond. That’s a lot of Spin challenges to hurtle through! Therefore, we wanted to send you off on an adventure and spread some of the love 🤍
Spoiler alert - we hope you tuned in to it!
Winners 🎆
The Persistence Award goes to C. Jang 🇰🇷 for completing all the challenges. 🎉 On top of that, we’re super happy to name the following additional winners:
- D.W. Croft 🇺🇸
- D. Briani 🇮🇹
- N. Shimizu 🇯🇵
- S. Rubanov 🇪🇸
We will reach out to all of you shortly 🎁.
Nobody Must Code Alone
Missed a challenge and interested in learning more? Don’t sweat it. We recorded all 4 livestream challenges for Advent of Spin 2024 and even put together a sample repo for the curious:
When we launched Advent of Spin 2024, we said “Nobody Must Code Alone.” We love our community who participated in Advent of Spin, watched our livestreams, and helped each other out in our Discord. We hope you had fun doing so and learned something along the way. We have a ton of cool things we’re working on this year and can’t wait to share them with you.
See you at Advent of Spin 2025!