This is a small writeup on the May 2021 release of VSCode PHP Debug adapter extension. A cover issue describing all work can be found on GitHub issues.

I am passionate about debugging and debuggers since, well, forever. When I started working with PHP many many years ago this was the one thing that truly bothered me - there was no “native” way to debug the code interactively. Then I discovered Xdebug.

On a nice May day, we spent a whole day going through Elastic APM Go Agent code, to try to figure out why it doesn't log Spans, and all Transactions of a certain kind are just always not sampled. Once again, because wrote our own Elastic APM PHP Agent, we got bit in the behind and spent a better part of the day WTF-ing through all the code, just to switch ONE BIT in the end, to solve the issue.

So you got an idea, or better somebody made you, migrate from a cosy EMC NFS server to a Windows Failover Cluster with File Server role serving NFS to Linux clients.

Challenge: Santa's IT department has recently discovered the power of version control software. However, they are not prepared for such power and have made a critical flaw… Can you find the flag?

Challenge: Santa forgot his password for the application he likes to use, but he found this old binary that contains the password. Can you help him retrieve it?