scriptkid

Today's the day I finally finished bandit at OverTheWire.

If you've used bash a little, most challenges aren't hard, but some require you to think outside of the box.

Don't worry if you're not a programmer or don't know Linux very well: my girlfriend is currently doing and enjoying the challenges, and she barely used the terminal before...

Anyway, I have a few takeaways from this challenge:

• it's fun
• you learn something along the way
• it's much like chess

It's fun

It really is. Sometimes you get stuck and want to never do bandit ever again: you return after a few days if you're of the competitive kind like me in games. And this is a competition mainly with yourself!

You learn something along the way

And you learn more from wrong attempts than from the actual solution. I ended up reading a ton of man pages when sometimes the solution was way simpler than I imagined and for sure picked up new knowledge about Linux.

It's much like chess

Well at least to me: in a chess game I usually hunt for weaknesses in my enemy position or in my enemy way of thinking (this is risky... sometimes I loose because of this way of playing). In bandit, you try to hunt for that specific “line” that grants you access to the next level's password. Checkmate.