I’m starting to think about what replaces 12in23 in 2024. I invented 12in23 in about five minutes on Jan 2nd this year, and I’d like to give 2024 a little more thought!
I’m wondering about having programming concepts instead of languages groups. So maybe still a functional and OOP months, but then maybe a month on numbers and one on strings, and one on bits and bytes. I’m thinking the content we make could be more focused on the actual language concepts.
But I’m really open to any and all ideas. The monthly reguarlity still feels good to me, but beyond that I’m very open to explore things!
I think a month on certain concepts would be great. Then we could have little workshop-like introductions and prepare exercises in fitting languages that cover the topic.
If we brainstorm a bit, I am sure we can get 12 interesting topics together. I’ll start:
I think to look forward, we also have to look backward. Looking at the amounts who completed each month’s theme (completing means getting the badge).
Month
Users
Functional February
2368
Mechnical March
2150
Analytical April
1782
Mindshifting May
686
Summer of Sexps
455
Jurassic July
628
Appy August
1731
Slimline September
251(this far)
We can see there were months with high usage and other months with lower usage. My analysis of these numbers is that there was an initial hype for functional February and perhaps it is at the beginning of the year that helped it with an upswing. The month in itself had only one of the 12 largest languages (when the even occurred) from an amount of users’ perspective. Then mechanical march rolls around with a bit fewer users but still going strong. At the same time that month has 4 of the 12 largest languages on the platform. So the fact that likely some of those users were just doing the language for the language itself seems higher to me. Then Analytical April rolls around with yet another drop. But at the same time, this month has Python which is the largest language on the platform. And here could it theoretically be quite a big group who just did Python because they wanted to practice that language and not because 12in23. Then Mindshifting May rolls around with the largest drop this far with over 1000, even though it has 1 of the 12 largest languages. Then Summer of Sexps rolls around with a drop of around another 200 students. This month had no of the top 12th languages. Then July rolls around with the first increase of 200 students with 2 of the largest languages. Then Appy August comes with 4 of the largest languages and had the largest increase of around 1000 students, and around 20 languages itself. Then Slimline September rolls around and the amount of students isn’t set yet because the month isn’t but if it continues as it had done in the first part of the month could we see around the month ending up with around 450-550 students.
tltr: I think the event has lost popularity since the first few months and the number of users doing a certain language during a month is not having a huge impact on users’ language choices.
I think the event throughout the year the hype died down a bit. I think instead of doing an event each month which is more or less the same but with different themes. So in general my feeling is that it is better to have a bit of a mix with a bit of a mixup each month instead of having each month being very similar but with a different language. I am not saying that 12in23 inst a success and shouldn’t be continued more aiming this as constructive feedback on what to think about moving forward.
We did live interviews for Feb and March, then haven’t since. That meant that the “hype” slowed down a bit.
The people watching the monthly video has actually increased each month. (Its hard to see that from the YT stats but so far 1,157 people have watched the September one, which is lots more than had watched March half way through March).
These are the number of people joining the challenge each month: {1=>10219, 2=>6338, 3=>4548, 4=>3336, 5=>2233, 6=>1961, 7=>2836, 8=>2680, 9=>1559}. So there’s still a healthy appetite for people to want to learn new languages, even if they’re not getting the badges. Maybe they just try two or three exercises, not 5, etc.
Maybe this is worth splitting out into its own discussion though?
Speaking only for myself, my lack of participation in Slimline September has naught to do with hype or lack thereof, and all to do with my not liking any of the languages, so I just have zero interest, even though it means forfeiting the badge for the whole year.
I like the idea of concepts. Perhaps a first one to introduce would be returning values from functions. Maybe that would cut down on the amount of people who get stuck because they are printing to the console instead of returning a value.
Maybe this is more like a weird 2025 idea. What if you could cover a number of larger concepts (from 3-5 languages), and connect solutions together to build something larger? Maybe a game? A larger puzzle to solve?
We could highlight a specific exercise once a week or every two weeks, highlighting the tracks that have implemented it each time. Students can stick to their preferred track when it has a particular exercise, but they can treat it as a self-guided 12in23 focusing on that single exercise. If they do Say in Python, they can also try it out in C# or Go and get a small taste of those languages.
Since the focus is on the exercises, you don’t need the longer monthly videos introducing each language. Maybe a short five-minute video if necessary.
I like the idea of a weekly exercise. It is almost the same workload as this year with 55 exercises instead of 52.
I could also see the benefit that maintainers would try to implement the weekly exercise into their tracks or polish the exercise in other ways.
Each week we’ll feature an exercise. We’ll put together an official walkthrough video (in a language (or two?) of Erik’s choice) but also encourage people to put together their own walkthroughs in other languages, along with approaches in advance.
We’ll start with Hello World in week one (as all tracks have that!) and then we’ll do Leap in week two. So if you’d like to do approaches/articles for you track, or put together a video for your track in advance, you can get cracking on that.
Then we’ll put together a calendar for the rest of the year in the first week of Jan too, so people can start to plan in advance.
We’ll do a badge for completing all 52 exercises, a badge for completing all 52 exercises in 3 languages, and then some periodic badges as well.
We just need a name? #52in24 doesn’t run off the tongue as smoothly. Any better ideas?
We just need a name? #52in24 doesn’t run off the tongue as smoothly. Any better ideas?
EXploreIn24 (maybe workshop some of the letter around if we need it to be shorter)
It rhymes, EX or Ex could also allude to Exercism, and no need to explain more with “explore”
Also considering that we have 52 exercises, it would be a good opportunity to laying out the exercises in a deck of cards format. Solving all 52 means you get the full deck (I like playing cards so this is a personal bias, lol)
Last and not least, I was hoping for some sort of build up / escalation exercises that related to each other.
Many languages lack concepts which makes it harder for students to learn and use Exercism. Why not set the challenge to add concepts to a language per month?
Edit: iHiD told me about Freeing our maintainers
Another idea: I’m surprised how much time it took me to learn about Exercism be it on Reddit or just Google. People share a lot of links to video courses but these courses lack exercices and I always wondered how they managed to learn programming.
Anyway, why not have a month dedicated to spreading the word about Exercism on social networks and forums dedicated to the topic of learning programming?
We’ll do a badge for completing all 52 exercises, a badge for completing all 52 exercises in 3 languages, and then some periodic badges as well.
Does the second part of this mean 52 exercises divided into 3 languages (say, 17 + 17 + 18 = 52), or each of 52 exercises completed in 3 languages (52 * 3 = 156)?
We just need a name? #52in24 doesn’t run off the tongue as smoothly. Any better ideas?
Our French friends will probably recognize #hebdomadal24 or even just #hebdo24. I’m mostly joking, but maybe people would see it and their interest would be piqued when they wonder what the heck “hebdomadal” means.
This week brought to you by the Letter(s) ____, the number ____, and the concept ____.
Letter(s) being whatever the exercise(s) start with, the number being the week number, and the concept … well, I’d have to think about that one!
Another (silly) thought: many folx still set a New Year’s resolution to “get in shape” . We could do a "Whip your coding into shape in 2024" or “Get into coding shape in '24 with weekly exercises”.
The Exercsim exercise plan for 2024.
Ok, maybe that isn’t as cool as it sounded in my head …
It could be like a 