It's been over a year since our last Capture the Flag competition, and in the meanwhile we've fielded dozens of inquiries about when the next one's coming. The wait is almost over: CTF3 will be here a week from today.

Next Wednesday, starting at 11am San Francisco time (2pm Boston, 7pm London, 6am Melbourne), we'll be launching CTF3.

This time around, we're trying something a bit different. Rather than being about security, CTF3 will focus on distributed systems engineering. You'll learn how to build fault-tolerant, performant software while playing around with a bunch of cool cutting-edge technologies. Like with previous CTFs, our goal is to give you hands-on exposure to interesting engineering problems that you normally only get to read about. If you've been wanting to really grok things like Paxos/Raft, DDOS prevention, distributed search, or Bitcoin (and maybe even bit twiddling), now's your chance.

As always, we're building this CTF for programmers of all skill levels and backgrounds. Even if the above sounds daunting, you should still give it a shot — you might be surprised by what you can accomplish. For those looking for some competition, there will be leaderboards where you can compete against your friends or the CTF community at large.

Want to meet and hack alongside your fellow CTFers in person? While the main gathering will once again be based on IRC (check back for details next week), we'll also be hosting kickoff events in San Francisco, Boston, and London.

Over the next week, the CTF team (Siddarth Chandrasekaran, Andy Brody, Christian Anderson, and I) will be putting the finishing touches on CTF3. See you on the other side!