Introducing #48in24

New year, new challenge!

It’s 2024 and I’m really excited to announce that we’re rolling out a whole new year-long challenge to keep you motivated on your programming journey - #48in24!

Now, don’t panic, we’re not upping the game and asking you to learn 48 programming languages this year to replicate what we did with #12in23 - that would be ridiculous even by our standards. Instead, we’re challenging you to solve and dig into 48 different exercises throughout the year.

Each week we’re going to be unveiling a new featured exercise for you to try out. And for each exercise you can earn three awards: Bronze: Completing the exercise in any language. Silver: Completing the exercise in any three languages. Gold: Achieving silver plus having completed (either historically or this year) the exercise in the three featured languages.

You can complete the exercises at any time during the year. However, we’re going to try and mix up the difficulties and types of tasks throughout the year, so if you complete them in order, it should feel like a more interesting and varied experience!

The aim isn’t just for you to solve the exercise, but to take the opportunity to really dig into the different ways the exercise can be solved - consider different tradeoffs and approaches, and ideally try it in different languages (e.g. try an OOP approach, a functional approach, a logic-based approach, etc). We’ll be encouraging people to request mentoring on the exercise and discuss it on the forum and Discord.

We’re also going to be using this opportunity to focus our contributing community on adding content around each featured exercise. In advance of the weekly unveiling, we’ll be asking the community to write new Approaches and Articles, record walkthroughs, and ensure the exercise is up to date for that track. As a core team, we’ll also be checking and improving the exercise instructions and recording our own language-agnostic explorations of the exercises, looking at some of the interesting different ways they can be solved.

Exercises will be released on Tuesdays and the first will be January 16th. We’ll then continue releasing one per week until we hit 48 in December, giving people the last couple of weeks of the year to tie up any loose ends (and have a holiday!)

You can sign up for the challenge at https://exercism.org/challenges/48in24 - see you inside!