These days these things are less useful, but recreating known-exploits is still educational. Once you get buffer-overflows handled you can look for more exotic things, format-string attacks, and similar.
Without going too far side-tracked: I think the Arch wiki has demonstrated that a community wiki can be very useful - I do hope people continue to contribute to the Debian wiki (although I find myself mostly on Ubuntu of late).
Anyway, there's a certain path from phrack through debian-administration.org that maps out where I find myself today, so happy coincidence to see the two line up in the threads.
I moved from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Helsinki about five years ago. (I'm actually going to complete my post-Brexit registration to retain permanent residency this afternoon!)
The arch wiki has been very useful to me over the past few years, I guess the barrier to entry there is lower for contributors. On my site I had a fair number of people writing interesting blog-posts, and comments, but only very very rarely did anybody submit an article.
I felt like I had a good niche audience, but sadly never quite enough people to keep me really motivated. I'm just glad I managed to setup the redirects to the wayback machine - I feel like if the site disappeared for good I'd have lost a chunk of my life!
https://steve.fi/security/exploits/
These days these things are less useful, but recreating known-exploits is still educational. Once you get buffer-overflows handled you can look for more exotic things, format-string attacks, and similar.