The Summit

The Handshake

The Character Play

The $200 Handshake BSidesOK 2026. Glenpool, Oklahoma. A two-day cybersecurity event I'd been circling on the calendar for months. The AI Security Summit on Day 1 was $199. The training days before that were $250 a pop. I could have just bought a ticket. But that's not how I think. I looked at the situation and did what any decent hacker does... I devised a plan where everybody wins. I sent a volunteer email. Last minute. No connections. No resume that says CISO on it. Just a guy in cowboy boots with a mohawk who said "hey, I'll work the door if you let me in the room." Day 1 was the AI Security Summit. Smaller crowd. Six talks covering the full spectrum... Microsoft talking Copilot Security. A law firm breaking down AI liability. Red team operators showing how to break LLMs beyond basic prompt injection. An enterprise governance framework. Third-party vendor AI risk assessment. And a talk on vibe engineering with Claude Code that caught my attention for reasons that should be obvious. BSidesOK gave AI security its own day. Its own ticket. Its own stage. A community conference in Oklahoma running a dedicated AI governance summit alongside Microsoft is the signal. AI governance has graduated from "one talk on the agenda" to its own program. One of the Summit speakers that I intentionally went to hear speak and try to meet with gave a talk on vibe engineering... using Claude Code, MCP integrations, RAG pipelines. Good talk. Real practitioner energy. After the session, during the networking lunch, I walked up, showed him what I'd been building, and introduced him to two new methodologies... CAG and KAG. Cache-Augmented Generation and Knowledge-Augmented Generation. He'd never heard of either. We exchanged info and moved about our days. Nobody remembers a middle-aged guy with a homelab. Every conference has fifty of those. They blend together like beige cubicle walls. But everybody remembers the comic book super villain looking guy running around telling people he's basically building an Autobot from junk and using his RV as the frame. The mohawk isn't costume. The cowboy boots aren't a bit. That's just what I look like on a Thursday. But it's also positioning. When you look like a character, people remember the character. And when the character has substance behind it... when you can back up the look with the work... that's when parallel paths collide. Total cost of attendance: $0 in ticket fees. Maybe $5 in gas and a $3 iced tea from QT. Total return: lots of new friends and contacts, two warm connections who collectively span academic research, enterprise security, and community organizing, and proof that showing up is still the most underrated strategy in tech. Show up. Be useful. Be memorable. Be yourself. Don't be an ASS. The hallway track is where parallel paths collide. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse