My high school aged son came down at around midnight the other night to my cubby office in the basement, concerned about what had me up so late. I had my laptop open and he could see various bits of code up on my monitors. “Mom, what are you working on? Still stuff for work?”

I had a jsfiddle open, various tabs up in my web browser, and a kali Linux VM up. How to explain to my son my addiction which had me spiraling into the wee hours?

“No, closed out my work hours ago. This is coding for fun on a CTF”.

“Getting anywhere?”

“Welp, hashcat is churning, but so far it doesn’t look good, and this other stuff is me futzing on code to solve a different challenge. So, maybe?”

“Going to bed anytime soon?”

“Probably oughta, but…”

“Alright, mom. Love you. See you in the morning”

He knows me too well. A couple of hours later, I decided hashcat was not going to make it and I oughta find another approach. I left myself notes on the jsfiddle code as to next steps to try. Went to bed. Still up in time to wake him up for school. Life of a geek mom.