Mine isn't a love story, but a treasure hunt: https://i.imgur.com/OH1Fotf.png https://i.imgur.com/OH1Fotf.png Stop reading here if you want to try your hand at

Mine isn't a love story, but a treasure hunt: https://i.imgur.com/OH1Fotf.png https://i.imgur.com/OH1Fotf.png Stop reading here if you want to try your hand at it yourself! ...spoiler follows... Several years back I met someone at a conference who made an impression. She had good technical chops and a refreshing sense of humility. We spoke on many topics, including trepidation over a big life decision she faced. Out of encouragement, and perhaps an eye to eventual recruitment, I spent that evening creating this little challenge for her. It started with a QR code linking to a snippet of source that draws an old IBM punch card onto the screen. To decode it, she had to learn a bit about 70's technology and the IBM 80 column format. A couple days later, I got back a short program of her own that correctly decoded the characters and ended with the comment: // TODO: discover all of your secrets which I expect reflected a cheerful indignance she felt upon discovering her efforts so far only revealed a bock of ciphertext. Her code had clarity and elegance, and included ASCII art of a punch card which I first thought was documentation but actually served as a sort of Rosetta stone constant used to derive character mappings. Watermarks on the punch card hinted toward the encryption algorithm used in the Enigma machine, and by the end of the day she'd cracked the code. It decrypted to a short but heartfelt message of inspiration. She loved the puzzle and I had a blast creating it. And before you ask... yes, she was cute, but I was already spoken for (and IIRC I think so was she). Thanks for asking such a poignant question, it's great reading all the other beautiful stories your submission has evoked.