I started up this blog as a place to muse on current tech projects and share what I'm doing and learning. Then I went and got re-mired in my Matasano code, which I can't share.

Last spring, on a tip from Steve, I spent a bunch of time working on the then-brand-new Matasano Crypto Challenges, which you should go read about if you're not already familiar.

It was perfect for me in a lot of ways. In addition to my longstanding interest in things cryptological, it was a perfect venue to try my hand at more "practical" code, as I described in a previous post. The exercises are (more or less) graded, and in many cases tell you roughly how you're going to approach the goal. I plugged at the first set of exercises for a few days, and felt like I'd wrapped my head around something new. I finished the first set and received the second, and things got even more interesting.

Without revealing any content, I'll say that exercise 12 was particularly fun, engaging, and rewarding to accomplish. I felt quite a bit of momentum, and ready to tackle whatever came at me.

Then, I hit exercise 13. I got stuck.

I think the exercise assumed a certain level of practical familiarity with web-transaction infrastructure. [*] User authentication, cookies, that sort of thing. I know more or less how that stuff works, but have little hands-on experience actually implementing them for a production website. Building on what I'd learned from the exercises thus far, I quickly sort of painted myself into a corner, feeling like every avenue I pursued wound up a dead end.

Having a brand-new baby in the house also didn't help. Time devoted to the project evaporated for a time.

There was a HDD failure on my dev/hacking machine, too, but that's another post.

This week, after several months away from the code, I revisited the Matasano Crypto Challenges. I worked through my existing code, reminding myself what I'd done and how. I reimplemented a few functions, just to see if different ways to do things seemed cleaner or appealed more. Some did. And, as a lot of coders say, reading your own code months or years later can be painful, but also eye-opening.

Then I approached that sticky wicket, exercise 13, with a fresh mind. I didn't even look at the code I'd written for it; I just reread the assignment, and started coding.

I got my test code to pass yesterday. Turns out, it wasn't that bad. My solution isn't perfect: I'm not entirely happy with some of the assumptions it makes (again, I'm trying not to reveal anything about the exercise content here), but it works, and at least I have something to improve on now.

And, best of all, now I get to think about exercise 14.

[*]	See this Pinboard blog post for a good description of the Matasano Crypto Challenges by someone who does have that familiarity.