I had a great time at the CTF and conference. I didn’t know what to expect with the conference part as I haven’t really looked into what a conference is. The CTF was a little different from what I was expecting, I guess I’ve only done more teaching focused ones like picoCTF. There was a pretty nice range of difficulty in the challenges, but the cryptography was a little lacking. I never had to spend time looking into what cipher it might have been and I was able to use online tools without any thought. I remember a challenge from a past CTF that I had to research a kind of cipher and write some code to figure out part of it myself. It was a little odd adding more challenges partway through, but I guess kind of appropriate at the time. I really struggled on those reverse engineering problems, but I got the third one yet not the other two before it. The first one I couldn’t figure out anything with and couldn’t run, the second I was able to run but it gave no feedback and I couldn’t make sense of the assembly, and the third one was just a simple game of higher lower.