In the run-up to Christmas, there is a tradition across the web design and development community to produce advent calendars, typically with a new article or resource for each day of December. Last year, I did a roundup of these calendars, and now that the 2019 season is in full swing, here is this year’s line-up.

I’m sure you’ll notice that the majority of the calendars published here are true community efforts, often with the bulk of the work falling to an individual or tiny team, with no budget to pay authors and editors. So, please join us in supporting these efforts; share the articles that you enjoyed reading and join the discussions respectfully.

What follows is an amazing variety of calendars, taking different approaches to the idea of publishing something every day in advent. There are plenty of traditional articles, but also code challenges to get involved with. I’ve tried to locate RSS Feeds and Twitter accounts to make it easy for you to keep track of your favorites. Enjoy!

It’s A Shape Christmas

It’s A Shape Christmas is a digital calendar that counts down to Christmas and reveals a bespoke illustration each day themed around four different shapes (Square, Triangle, Circle and Hexagon) and Christmas. The project was started in 2011 by a UK design agency called Made by Shape. This year, it is showcasing some of the best of the previous seasons.

• @shapechristmas on Twitter

24 Ways

For twenty-four days, 24 ways is publishing a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring folks a little Christmas cheer. It’s celebrating 15 years of advent publishing and will be taking a well-earned break after this year’s “final countdown”.

• RSS Feed
• @24ways on Twitter

24 Days In Umbraco

24 Days In Umbraco is a calendar of articles relating to the Umbraco CMS. However, the themes of the articles so far this year will be of interest to more people than just those who use Umbraco. I enjoyed the article from December 2nd — Setting The Stage by Laura Weatherhead about public speaking.

• @24daysinumbraco on Twitter

PerfPlanet Calendar

PerfPlanet is back for another season with all things speed and web performance. The Web Performance Calendar has been publishing since 2009 and is maintained by Sergey Chernyshev.

• RSS Feed
• @perfplanet on Twitter

Lean UXMas

Lean UXMas has been publishing each advent since 2014 and is a collection of the most popular articles from this year’s Agile & Lean UX News delivered daily this coming December.

• RSS Feed
• @leanuxmas on Twitter

24 Days In December

Back with 24 thoughts from the PHP family is 24 Days in December. They began publishing in 2015, when Andreas Heigl realized that he missed Web Advent who had stopped publishing in 2012.

• RSS Feed
• @24DaysInDec on Twitter

Perl Advent

Perl Advent is back. Mark Fowler has been publishing since 2000 and is the longest running web advent calendar that I know of. You’ll find insightful articles written by diverse author submissions from all types of Perl programming levels, so sit back and enjoy 2019’s for 24 merry days of Perl!

• RSS Feed
• @perladvent on Twitter

24 Accessibility

24 Accessibility are back for a third year of accessibility posts in the run-up to Christmas. The site also has an excellent set of a11y related books, events, and Twitter accounts to follow in the sidebar.

• RSS Feed
• @24accessibility on Twitter

“A Language A Day” Advent Calendar

In this calendar, Andrew Shitov is introducing a different programming language each day. I like the fact that for each language he is examining the same set of tasks, which makes for interesting comparisons. It’s an impressive amount of work to undertake.

• RSS Feed

SysAdvent

Now in its 11th year, SysAdvent is a collection of articles written by sysadmins and published with the goals of sharing, openness, and mentoring.

• RSS Feed
• @SysAdvent on Twitter

Ladies of Code

New this year is the Ladies of Code Advent Calendar, from Ladies of Code, an organization that runs workshops, meetups, and hack nights across Europe.

• @ladiesofcode on Twitter

The JVM Programming Advent Calendar

Originally the Java Advent Calendar, this annual offering renamed to JVM Advent as the ecosystem is more than just the Java language.

• RSS Feed
• @JavaAdvent on Twitter

RIPSTECH Java Security Calendar

In 2017 RIPSTECH published a PHP Security calendar and in 2018 a WordPress Security calendar. They are back for 2019 with a focus on Java security. Can you spot the vulnerability in each of the 24 challenges?

WordPress Snippets Til Christmas

Elliott Richmond has come together with other folks in the WordPress community to publish useful WordPress snippets every day of advent to help developers improve their workflow.

• RSS Feed
• #wpsnippetstilxmas on Twitter

The Third Annual C# Advent

A community effort with 50 slots, two per day, for people to claim and write an article about C# development. The articles are hosted on the authors’ sites or on Medium, and so the calendar is a list of links to them all.

• @mgroves on Twitter

Marco’s Extended Advent Calendar

Marco Zehe is posting daily until Christmas, and says these posts could be about “everything and anything”. However, expect a strong accessibility focus given his areas of expertise!

• @MarcoInEnglish on Twitter
• @MarcoZehe on Twitter

IT Security Advent Calendar

“Stay safe online all Advent time” is the credo of the IT Security Advent Calendar. Counting down to Christmas, it features a new tip for protecting your devices, networks, and data each day.

HaXmas

HaXmas is a security advent calendar by Rapid7 that is full of stories, advice, inspiration, and a bit of fun. Keep an eye on a new tidbit every day throughout December!

PHP Advent Calendar

Every year, for the first 24 days in December, the PHP Advent Calendar invites members of the PHPamily to share some gifts with you. And this year is no exception, of course.

Azure Advent Calendar

Run by Richard Hooper and Gregor Suttie, the initial idea of this advent calendar was to give people who aren’t that well-known an opportunity to share their content with the community. What started with 25 slots expanded to 75. A small community-driven idea brought to you by the community!

• YouTube channel
• #azureadventcalendar on Twitter

Webアクセシビリティ Advent Calendar 2019

This Japanese advent calendar has been running since 2013. Its focus lies on web accessibility, with a new author exploring a topic each day. The calendar is moderated by @hokaccha.

24 Jours De Web

24 Jours De Web is a lovely French calendar which first appeared back in 2012. The creators support the Pierre Deniker Foundation and kindly ask readers to donate to help this charity support mental health research and education.

• RSS Feed
• @24joursdeweb on Twitter

Kodekalender by Knowit

This Norwegian calendar is a series of programming challenges (each open for 24 hours only) with a prize draw at the end. Solving more puzzles gets you more entries. Good luck!

• @knowitnorge on Twitter

Fronteers Advent Calendar

For the Dutch speakers among you, Fronteers are running an advent calendar on their blog. As last year, each writer chooses a charity, and the Fronteers organization will donate 75 euros on their behalf.

• RSS Feed
• @Fronteers on Twitter

SELFHTML Adventskalender

An advent calendar with web development tips in German comes from the SELFHTML community, who are committed to documenting web technologies for German-speaking developers in their SELFHTML wiki.

Advent Of Code

If you prefer a puzzle over an article, take a look at Advent of Code. Created by Eric Wastl, this is an advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

• @ericwastl on Twitter

HACKvent 2019

The folks at Hacking Lab bring you a new (white-hack) hacking challenge every day during advent. You earn points based on the difficulty of your solution, but be quick, you need to solve the challenge on the same day to receive full points.

25 Days Of Serverless

25 Days Of Serverless has a new coding challenge waiting for you every day, for 25 days. Solve it in the programming language of your choice and submit your solution via GitHub. The best solutions will be showcased every week and possibly in a final series recap.

Advent Of Cyber

Advent of Cyber is TryHackMe’s Christmas Security Challenge. And since security can be a daunting field, they break down common security topics into “byte-sized” challenges leading up to Christmas.

#DevToolsAdvent

Alex Lakatos started #DevToolsAdvent to count down the days to Christmas. Every day, he’ll be tweeting a useful Firefox DevTools tip or trick.

• #DevToolsAdvent
• @lakatos88 on Twitter

#devAdvent

Last year Sarah Drasner announced that she would be highlighting a person and project every day of Advent using the hashtag #devAdvent. She is continuing the tradition this year. Follow along to get to know some new folks and the work they do.

• @sarah_edo on Twitter
• #devAdvent

Last year I did a dev advent calendar, and I'm going to keep it going this year. Every day from the 1st to the 25th, I’ll highlight a new person/project that I’m into and think people would benefit from knowing about. ❤️

The hashtag is #devAdvent if you want to follow along

— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) November 29, 2019

#CodeTidbits30

Another tweet calendar comes from Samantha Ming: follow her as she tweets 30 days of handy JS, HTML, and CSS snippets.

• @samantha_ming on Twitter
• #CodeTidbits30

#CodeTidbits30 Day 1 🎄

For the entire Dec, DAILY posts! 30 days straight of the very best JS, HTML, CSS snippets!

Let's start off with a classic. 3 ways to filter out duplicates from an array and return only the unique values.#Codenewbie #100DaysOfCode #301DaysOfCode pic.twitter.com/7j1dSh3CgW

— Samantha Ming (@samantha_ming) December 1, 2019

Bekk Christmas

Last year, Norwegian company Bekk produced four calendars. This year, they are back with twelve! In a blog post, they explain why they are producing such a huge number of articles this year. I learned that there are over 100 authors from within the company — many of who have not written articles before. Therefore, in the lead up they have been taking part in writing workshops. Perhaps we will find some future Smashing authors among them!

The homepage for the project is at bekk.christmas where you can check out the topics that interest you most.

• CSS Christmas
• Functional Christmas
• Java Christmas
• JavaScript Christmas
• Kotlin Christmas
• Machine Learning Christmas
• Open Source Christmas
• React Christmas
• Security Christmas
• The Cloud Christmas
• UX Christmas

Share The Ones I Missed!

There seem to be even more calendars publishing this year than last, despite the fact that some are taking a break this year. It’s been nice to find some calendars in languages other than English, too! If you know of a calendar related to web design and development that I haven’t mentioned here, please post it in comments section below.

Enjoy your seasonal reading!

(il, cm)

In the run-up to Christmas, there is a tradition across the web design and development community to produce advent calendars, typically with a new article or resource for each day of December. In this article, I have rounded up all those that I have found to be running this year, along with RSS feeds where they can be located, and Twitter accounts to make it easier to follow along.

Q: What’s 14 years old and not at all in a last minute panic?

— 24 ways (@24ways) November 27, 2018

It is a lot of work to publish an article every day — as we well know here at Smashing — and we have a whole team here to help. However, the majority of the calendars published here are true community efforts, often with the bulk of the work falling to an individual or tiny team, with no budget to pay authors and editors. So, please join us in supporting these efforts, share the articles that you enjoyed reading, and join the discussions respectfully. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, you can certainly learn a lot of new things over the next 24 days.

Perl Advent

Perl Advent has been running since 2000 and is the longest running web advent calendar that I know of. Now old enough to enjoy a festive sherry (in Europe at least), they are back for 2018 for 24 merry days of Perl.

• RSS Feed
• @perladvent on Twitter

24 Ways

I have to admit a little bias in this subject as 24 Ways is the calendar started by my husband, business partner and fellow Smashing Magazine editor, Drew McLellan. 24 Ways has been running since 2005, when Drew had the idea to post a new article each day of December until Christmas. I don’t think either of us expected that on the 30th November 2018, Drew would still be staying up until midnight to check that the first article went live!

• RSS Feed
• @24ways on Twitter

PerfPlanet Calendar

Ever since 2009, the Performance Calendar has been helping us to speed up the web. It is up again for the 10th year in a row and is maintained by Sergey Chernyshev.

• RSS Feed
• @perfplanet on Twitter

24 Jours De Web

Next on my list is the French language calendar, 24 Jours De Web. Their first year of publication was 2012, and they are supporting the charity L’Auberge des Migrants, asking readers to donate to help refugees in Calais and the North of France, providing material and food aid, support and advocacy.

• RSS Feed
• @24joursdeweb on Twitter

Christmas XP

The Christmas XP calendar is a little different. Rather than an article each day, they bring us a WebGL experiment. They have been bringing us experiments in WebGL since 2012.

• @christmasxp on Twitter
• @christmasxp on Twitter

AWS Advent

If you would like to brush up on your AWS skills then the AWS Advent calendar promises “a yearly exploration of AWS in 24 parts”. You’ll find a wide range of articles on security, deployment strategy and general tips and techniques to be aware of when using Amazon Web Services.

• RSS Feed
• AWSAdvent on Twitter

24 Days In December

If PHP is your language of choice then you can look forward to 24 days of PHP articles over at 24 Days in December. They began publishing in 2015, when Andreas Heigl realized that he missed Web Advent who had stopped publishing in 2012.

In his wrap-up post after the initial season Andreas wrote:

“I came to realize that I missed the phpadvent/webadvent the last years. And wouldn’t it be great to have a read about something PHP-related for the first 24 Days in December? Even for those people that are not Christian, the time before Christmas has to be a special time. And if it’s only due to the commercials and ads what to present.

So I would wait and see whether someone would arrange something.

But wait! When everyone thinks someone should do something, no-one will do anything.”

I’m happy that the community effort started by Andreas, when he realized that he would need to be the person who did something, is back for another year.

• RSS Feed
• @24DaysInDec on Twitter

24 Pull Requests

The 24 Pull Requests calendar is a little different. It began in 2012 with the idea that contributors should, “Send 24 pull requests between December 1st and December 24th.” The idea being that this would be 24 gifts to the open-source community from every contributor. Since the project began, 19,859 have contributed (at the time of writing).

It’s a brilliant idea, and I really love their updated policy for 2018. Recognizing that making Pull Requests is only one way that people contribute to open source, the site has widened the scope of contributions. You can make a Pull Request as before if this is how you contribute. However, you can also complete a form to track your non-PR contribution. Perhaps you wrote a tutorial, ran a meetup, mentored someone — these things are all important contributions too. Read the updated contribution policy for 2018 and join in!

• @24PullRequests on Twitter
• Chat with people who are taking part this year on Gitter

UXmas

UXmas have been publishing their Advent Calendar for UX folk since 2012. I am very impressed that they already have their call for submissions for 2019 up and running. So, you can read some useful aticles this year and submit your idea for next year at the same time.

• @merryuxmas on Twitter

24 Accessibility

24 Accessibility are back for a second year of accessibility posts in the run-up to Christmas. The project was started by Dennis Deacon, an Accessibility Engineer with The Paciello Group, and will be well worth following this year.

• RSS Feed
• @24accessibility on Twitter

Fronteers Advent Calendar

Fronteers are running 24 posts in Dutch on their blog. A lovely touch is that each writer chooses a charity, and the Fronteers organization will donate 75 euros on their behalf.

• RSS Feed
• @Fronteers on Twitter

Advent Of Code

If you would prefer a puzzle over an article, take a look at Advent of Code. Created by Eric Wastl, this is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

• @ericwastl on Twitter

24 Days In Umbraco

24 Days In Umbraco is a calendar of articles relating to the Umbraco CMS. They have been publishing every December since 2012. Their About page says that the calendar started when:

“… we asked a bunch of Umbraco people if they had a favorite feature, a story or something else that they’d be willing to write a short article about. Then we’d post a new one here every day through December.”

• @24daysinumbraco on Twitter

Advent Speaker Tips

New this year is a daily public speaking tip on the Notist blog.

• RSS Feed
• @benotist on Twitter

Data-Driven Advent Calendar

The Data-Driven Advent Calendar will contain an article about data journalism each day of Advent. The project is from Journocode who are computer scientists and journalists working in newsrooms across Germany.

• @journocode on Twitter

A Computer Of One’s Own

Posting to Medium, A Computer Of One’s Own will highlight the lives of the pioneers of the computer age. The project is by Alvaro Videla, with illustrations by Sebastian Navas.

• @old_sound (Alvaro Videla) on Twitter

React, JavaScript, Security And Elm Christmas

A set of calendars sponsored by Norwegian company Bekk. They are supporting React Christmas, JavaScript Christmas, Security Christmas and Elm Christmas. That’s a whole lot of articles to curate!

#devAdvent

Not a website but instead a hashtag: Sarah Drasner tweeted that she would be highlighting a person and project every day of Advent using the hastag #devAdvent. Follow along to get to know some new folks and the work they do.

• @sarah_edo on Twitter
• #devAdvent

Tomorrow I’m gonna start a dev advent calendar. Every day from the 1st to the 25th, I’ll highlight a new person and a project of theirs that I’m into and think people would benefit from knowing about. ❤️

— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) November 30, 2018

Share The Ones I Missed!

If you know of a calendar related to web design and development that I haven’t mentioned here, post a comment. Enjoy your seasonal reading!

(il)