Soatok Dreamseeker on Nostr: How do you convince strangers that you're not there to bullshit them, if you have no ...

How do you convince strangers that you're not there to bullshit them, if you have no credibility to lend your own words?

Especially if the only projects under your belt are things other security professionals at the time looked down upon?

In the "I am above contributing to this project" sense. One person compared one of my biggest projects at the time to trying to secure crayon drawings, rather than anything professionals should use.

In the end, I said fuck it and went generic for my speaker bio.

It wasn't a great move for "selling the talk" to a prospective audience, but I felt better going with that than something that might set anyone up for disappointment if I didn't deliver. I wasn't exactly brimming with public speaking experience, after all.

I don't remember how the talk itself went, but I do remember the line of people asking really insightful questions afterwards. Many of them, I later learned, were quite credentialed, yet found my talk worth their time.

That felt... strange.