IT Used to Be Weird
Somewhere between the dot-com boom and the enterprise sales cycle, we lost the plot. Here's what I think happened — and why it matters.
I got into IT because it was weird. Not weird like "quirky startup culture" weird — weird like people named their servers after Simpsons characters and ran IRC bots that would insult you if you asked a dumb question. It was a subculture. It had teeth.
Somewhere along the way, the money showed up. And with the money came the suits. And with the suits came the frameworks, the compliance checklists, the 47-slide decks about "digital transformation." The craft got buried under process.
I'm not anti-business. I run businesses. But I am anti-boring. The best security work I've ever seen was done by people who thought of it as a game — who stayed up until 3am not because they had to, but because they genuinely wanted to know how the thing worked.
That energy is still out there. It never went away. It just got pushed to the margins — the CTF communities, the home lab forums, the Discord servers where people are still naming things after cartoon characters. That's where the real work is happening.
Mighty Penguin exists because I wanted to build something for those people. Hardware that takes the work seriously without taking itself seriously. Tools that make you smile when you open the box. The craft deserves better than beige.