I never thought I'd lose my sleep over a 30-year-old Operating System.

My recent participation in the Linux Learning session at Sackhumvit Centre on 11th July, 2026 made it possible.
The session was taken by Abhishek Ashok (Co-founder & CTO at Bottle Lab Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) and the session was hands-on, beginner-friendly, and gamified.

I had never used the Linux OS before, let alone writing commands in its terminal, and solving coding challenges.

The participants of the session were asked to start the session by taking a
1-minute typing test, in which I aced the test with 63 WPM and 96% accuracy.

Before going into the challenges Abhishek Sir took his time to explain to us the basics of the commands and about the terminal, he also provided a list of basic commands, we needed to know.
We were taught the basic commands (like pwd, cd, ls, mkdir, cd -, cd .., rmdir, rm, touch, find etc.) before jumping into the challenges.

In the first challenge we were asked to find the secret code of a puzzle by navigating 4 layers deep in a folder, which was fun.
And in the second challenge we were asked to recreate a given folder structure to get the secret code, both the challenges were good and taught us about the usecases of the commands in an engaging way; and I also solved the 3rd challenge which was planned for the next session (couldn't resist trying it).

In the final 10 min we had a puzzle to solve as teams of 2 and the first to do would get awards (btw I had no teammates).
Despite my full efforts under pressure, I managed to finish it 2nd, and got awarded an Ambrane's USB adapter.

The one thing this session taught me is that Linux isn't about memorizing commands, it's about understanding how your computer is organized - and dumb at the same time - that you need to specify each and every command in the right way for it to perform the task you ask for. The terminal should be precisely told what you want, else it doesn't get - you're intent - as to what you're asking for.

Excited for the next session, and if you have come this far, thanks for reading.
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