Best Creative Answer that is Technically Correct awarded (recorded as Ben Krüger)

I think this year I’ll have to write a little more about how it came about. Until then, you can access my solution as a Unity game here: https://quest.kringle.info/.

You can find the interactive, linked HTML-based solution here: 2025 SANS Holiday Hack Challenge.

Best Creative Answer that is Technically Correct awarded (recorded as Ben K.)

In my fourth year, I wanted to go the extra mile. After acquiring a lot of technical skills in previous years (Python programming, web with Bootstrap – I felt a bit like a full stack developer in the meantime), I wanted to create something special. To do this, I familiarised myself with desktop publishing and, with the help of artificial intelligence for text support, submitted a local North Pole daily newspaper as a report. I am so proud to have won the Best Creative Answer that is Technically Correct award with this submission. My solution can be viewed and downloaded here:

You can find the interactive, linked HTML-based solution here: 2024 SANS Holiday Hack Challenge

Of course, I also want to share where I got the knowledge for this year. Ally Anderson runs her website Affinity Revolution here: https://courses.affinityrevolution.com/. I got the knowledge for my report mainly from the Affinity Publisher for Beginners course. Thanks, Ally!

Super Honorable Mention awarded (recorded as Darkander)

In the third year, I improved the reporting even further. Instead of individual Python scripts, I created a complete web application written in Python and based on Flask and Bootstrap. The web application stores the Markdown code in an SQLite database and takes care of the upload and storage of additional image files. It also indicates clearly which tasks have already been processed and allows reports to be generated in HTML or Markdown. The source code can be found on GitHub. You can find my web application here: https://kringle.info/.

You can find the interactive, linked HTML-based solution here: 2023 SANS Holiday Hack Challenge

I also use the SANS HHC to acquire new knowledge and use this knowledge in my respective solution. I owe the knowledge for 2023 to Michael Kennedy, his website TalkPython can be reached here: https://training.talkpython.fm/. In my case I used the course Building Data-Driven Web Apps with Flask and SQLAlchemy. Thank you very much, Michael!

Honorable Mention awarded (recorded as Ben [Darkander])

In the second year of my participation, I wanted to improve the report generation. As in the first year, I wrote my descriptions and solutions in Markdown. However, as the compilation and linking took a lot of time, I created Python scripts to do the work for me. The complete generated report for 2022 can be viewed and downloaded here:

You can find the interactive, linked HTML-based solution here: 2022 SANS Holiday Hack Challenge

Super Honorable Mention awarded (recorded as Ben Krueger)

2021 was the first year I took part. I was primarily focused on the challenges and their solution. To create a report, I decided to use Markdown (GitHub-flavoured Markdown), as I thought it was perfect due to the simple language and syntax highlighting. I then exported the complete report to PDF format and made it available to view and download here:

You can find the interactive, linked HTML-based solution here: 2021 SANS Holiday Hack Challenge