I was watching Live Overflow the other day and he had made a pair of videos about how CTFs are awesome and, conversely, how CTFs are terrible.
And this got me thinking about how CTFs are the hackers' equivalent of coding katas and how I don't particularly "get" the point of coding katas.
Well, that's not strictly true.
I see coding katas as something akin to unit tests but for your personal development.
You take a small, easily defined problem and attempt to implement it using a technique or language you want to master and it's small and concise enough to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
But, then, when you've done it what do you have. Not a lot. A solution to a trivial problem that nobody really needs a solution to. Chuck it in the bin now I s'pose
So if this is all "so terrible", what's the alternative?
Find yourself a project that at least you will find more or less useful but that's also going to offer a challenge or two, that's going to throw you into "uncharted territory" or "stormy waters".
In many of my spare-time projects, I like to muck around with microcontrollers and, I've been working on a device to adapt an obsolete GPO-746 and bring it back to life.
I've always though that it's a good idea for personal development to go down one stage in abstraction. If, at work, you'd use a library or framework to achieve something - instead try to implement that functionality yourself. If Python would be a sensible language to use for some project, have a go at doing it in Rust instead.
With my microcontroller projects, I've taken this to the extreme of working in assembly language.
But I'm in danger of getting off topic. Keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming "Applying Software Engineering Practices to Assembly Language Programming" (Catchy title????)
... or better still "disdained"
After a while of working on my telephone project, it seemed the best way to go about things was to adapt it into an Android handset and to create a "simple" Android app to control it. If you want to have a look you can find it in on GitHub at andy-preston/gpo-746-android.
If I'm thinking of Android apps, I've got to look at using the JVM and Kotlin... I've got a bit of a problem there because, well, I've never really got on at all with the whole Java ecosystem. Is it just some personal foible or is it as bad as I say it is? I don't know. But I do know that it's certainly unexplored territory for me.
And then there's Gradle... Oh Gradle, why are you so over-complex? You're only a build system, do you really need to contain multiple turing-complete programming languages just to run a few build tasks?
So here I am in both "uncharted territory", and "stormy waters"... Purely by wanting to get something done, I've accidentally found that "perfect" substitute for coding katas that I was going on about in the first place.
I'm also using the CH340G serial USB chip to handle the
communication between my microcontroller in the old telephone
and the Android device. On Linux or BSD, this is just a matter
of opening a serial connection to /dev/ttyUSB0. But
on Android you actually need your own drivers for
"strange" USB devices in your app.
I could use one of the available Java libraries for driving serial USB chips on Android and, if this was a commercial project, I'd probably be stupid not to. But, for an exercise like this, that's just way too easy. I'm sure all the people at the real-life, non-metaphorical dojo would agree "no pain, no gain!". And, for this chip, "pain" is certainly the word for it. The CH340 family of chips are probably THE worst documented series of ICs in the entire history of electronics.
The only documentation I've got is the actual source-code for the Linux driver, the NetBSD driver, the FreeBSD driver and those 2 libraries I mentioned earlier. But the people who wrote this code also had no real documentation and reading their code, it comes over as leaning a little towards "cargo culting".
Now, if you're trying to "Do your 10,000 hours", you need Deliberate Practice. And you can spend that time taking exercises with no goal beyond development itself or you can find a useful (or, at least, useful to you) project to complete. But make sure that project has some challenges that will make your skillset grow.
Be obsessed with software quality and refine your project again and again until the code isn't just "not bad" but as close to perfect that you can get without quasi-divine superpowers... this is a spare time project - there's no manager here, fretting over deadlines.
And now you are free to walk out of the dojo!