Thread by @HackingButLegal

I want to share something important I learned thru the process of producing NFTs with my partner @0xBanana over the past months

I had a valuable realization stemming from the creation of new things of uncertain value & shipping them to buyers

This is for the #infosec crowd

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Creating art which is then roundly enjoyed by others has helped me with perfectionism.

Intellectually, I know that ‘perfect is the enemy of good’.

Unfortunately, my standards for my own work are often far too high to encourage incremental progress & learning in public.

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Part of the reason why I feel that way is because the security community is so frequently negatively judging. As this is the community I joined from a young age, it has molded my behavior to be far too constrained & limited — in direct opposition to the hacker ethos.

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Judging the work of oneself & others to an extremely high (& often unattainable) standard reduces the likelihood that people in a given community will produce original work for the benefit of said community by releasing it publicly — even when such efforts are sorely needed

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The community essentially molded my behavior to the point where I have refused to release original work in the security space.

Meaning: useful code/scripts. Methodologies. Process improvements. Updates to the state of the art in information security. Incremental progress.

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I haven’t always felt the things I’ve created have been good enough to stand up to the intense scrutiny which comes from both being a woman and a human in this space — and even if they were, I wanted to avoid the minutiae of the forced and oft-entitled/angry peer review.

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Through the work and culture of infosec, I’ve developed an extremely keen eye for mistakes, errors, and systematic problems — and often fail to state how much I appreciate the value of someone’s work before criticizing it.

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Yet what I’ve helped make has received so much kudos, & the process of making them has been so enjoyable & validating, that I feel I am “good enough” to release artwork for public sale & consumption under my own name — even if not at the level of a Kandinsky or Warhol.

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Seeing the support and kindness people make the effort to express in the #NFTcommunity (within certain communities on Discord especially, shout-out to @itskay_k) has repeatedly shown me that there is another way, and not everyone is like this outside our weird little bubble.

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I’d love for the infosec community to recognize how our overly-critical reactions to the work of others is often the opposite of encouragement, even if well-intentioned, and reduces opportunities for us to effectively learn from each other to improve our craft & culture ❤️

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