Advent calendars have their roots in German Lutheran tradition dating back to the 1800s. Traditionally they have been used to count the days of Advent, culminating in the Christmas holiday. In their modern incarnations, Advent calendars mark the days by presenting a different surprise on each day, and there are commercial versions featuring candy, small objects, readings, and yes, even whiskey. As the winter holiday season gets underway, the annual tradition of tech advent calendars also returns.
Here are some of our favorites to get you in the tech spirit for 2020:
- TryHackMe’s cybersecurity advent calendar offers quick cybersecurity lessons to keep you and your data safe as 2020 comes to a close.
- The C# Advent gamifies the experience this year with instructions on how to play along.
- Advent of Code’s design is as still and as beautiful as a cold winter’s night.
- JVM Advent is a calendar about Java programming. Its first offering is “Bringing Back Developer Joy” and we couldn’t agree more with the sentiment.
- Perl Advent shows us 24 “merry days of Perl.”
- Web Performance Calendar offers tips about optimizing web performance.
- If you’re looking for more, Len Jaffe’s Advent Planet aggregates online advent calendars focused on a range of tech and non-tech topics.
Many of the great advent calendars of Christmas past will not be published in 2020, but we recommend reading the archives of these wonderful blogs:
- SysAdvent offered an article a day from December 1-25, 2019, for system administrators.
- For those who are interested in digital accessibility (and by that we mean everyone), 24 Accessibility’s 24a11y.com is wonderful. They won’t be updating the calendar for 2020, but they recommend that we follow #accessibleadvent on Twitter.
- 24 Ways is an advent blog for web developers and designers. After 15 seasons, the authors decided to “take a breather and give it a rest.”
