Now that the submission deadline has passed, here is this year’s write up!
I chose to do things a little differently this year. I used GitHub to manage my notes and progress. Initially, I did it because I previously jumped between several hosts during the holiday hack, especially for activities that were easier in Linux than in Windows, but I didn’t end up needing Linux much this year. It did however, make it so much easier to put together the report since I had everything easily segmented.
I’ve got the full repo here: https://github.com/blakebourgeois/HolidayHack2020
It includes individual notes and code snippets that may not be present in the brief write up.
The PDF write up itself can be accessed directly here.
It was, as usual, another good holiday hack. I think it’s inevitable, after doing this for several years now, that it begins to feel repetitive in some aspects. It also doesn’t help that some of the challenges were taken or adapted from the free Netwars challenge this summer. That being said it’s still a great mix of familiar and novel challenges, and even the more familiar events have good twists.
There were a few instances this year in which I plugged along at the challenge all day only to have to step away at the end of the day, only to “solve it” at night. It was pretty gratifying to have it click, hit the console in the morning, and get the solution on the first attempt.
Now we wait for HHC 2021.