How I won the Ionic 2017 Easter Egg Hunt
06/14/2017 • 2 minute readOn March 9th, Ionic announced their new beta and an easter egg hunt. I didn’t see it until the 13th and I love puzzles, so the hunt was on.
Step 1: Download and Unpack the beta
I downloaded the new beta with npm install -g ionic@beta and extracted the source:
$ mkdir source && cd $_ && tar -zxvf /root/.npm/ionic/3.0.0-rc.2/package.tgz -C .
mktemp -d probably would have been a better option, but I didn’t want to spend the time to look up the syntax to cd into the new tmp dir.
Also, I have the install location for npm packages on my system memorized because I have spent far too long troubleshooting them, but if you didn’t you could find it with npm root.
Step 2: Pull the published Github code
I took a bet here that paid off. Knowing how the Ionic team operates, I figured they wouldn’t make it too easy and publish the easter egg in their public Github repo.
At the time I just ran:
$ git clone https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-cli.git
To replicate that now, you can download a commit from around that time. Here is random one:
$ git clone https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-cli.git && cd ionic-cli && git reset --hard d076ac806378d874ea1075c4142350b73654d04c
Most of this time was spent finding the Github url.
Step 3: Compare the Github and NPM version source code
Here I also made a bet that the easter egg would be under the main ionic package:
$ git diff --no-index source/package/ ionic-cli/packages/ionic | less
Hitting space as fast as I could, I noticed one change that looked interesting:
diff --git a/source/package/dist/commands/ionitron.ts b/ionic-cli/packages/ionic/src/commands/ionitron.ts
...
+ let str = [
+ '41 77 77 77 2e 2e 2e 73 6e 61 70 21 20 59 6f 75 20 66 6f 75 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 68 69 64 64 65 6e 20 66 65 61 74 75 72 65 20 61 6e 64 20 6d 69 67 68 74 20 67 65 74',
...
Now, I can’t convert hexadecimal in my head on the fly, but I have participated in enough “underhanded” coding challenges on codegolf.stackexchange.com back in the day to recognize an attempt at obfuscation.
Sure enough, if I try ionic ionitron, I get the following:
Conclusion
Hats off to the Ionic team for putting together a fun challenge, and I did end up getting a shirt out of it so I am happy:
