PicoCTF

I am trying something new. Well the topic and idea isn’t new, but my way of thinking about it and trying it is. I am trying some of the General Skills problems from PicoCTF. This program was recommended to me by my partner who has had his fair shares of participating and creating a lot of CTF challenges as a good place to get started. I have participated in a few CTF’s at smaller conferences in the past but never in a serious sense where that is where I spend all of my time during said conference.

My school used to talk about how its students have grit. I think to some degree that is true but it is not an easy thing to teach or to learn if it is not something that comes natural. It definitely didn’t for me, at least not the way I wanted it to. I have had grit for other areas of my life but having grit and determination in a physical sense is far different than an mental sense. Mental grit was something I saw my peers pick up significantly quicker than I did. I struggled with the fact I needed to be wrong not one, not twice, but tons of times until I was correct. I hated to be wrong and so many times I felt like I had exhasted my knowledge base for how to solve a problem but I didn’t have a problem asking for help like I feel most people struggle with, it was knowing what to ask.

I never quite felt like I grasped what mental grit looked like for myself. I watched how it clicked for others but I couldn’t quite get it right myself. The pace of learning that my higher education required did not give me much leniency to learn at my own pace so I believe I missed some important fundamentals. My goal is now to go back and make sure I get them, but specifically the way I get to them.

I am liking PicoCTF so far. I have done a few of the easy and medium challenges so far and it is proving to be an appropriate leveling and difficulty for what I am trying to do. I am struggling but not enough I want to give up. I am getting stuck, yet feeling more confident in refining my searches for what I need to look up to get the next part. I am improving on knowing what the next step is without explicit instruction. I am using the hints minimally if at all. I feel like I am learning the important aspects of technical problem solving because while I consider myself to be an excellent problem solver for many other things, I wanted to be able to take some of the same principles of that and see how it could be applied to more technical problems and way of thinking at that scale.

I am going to keep working on these and hopefully build up more confidence before I venture out to some of the other focus areas but so far I am very much enjoying this set of mini ctf challenges and their difficulty progression.