If you look at the opposite, shame as a strategy, it's basically 'whatever you're doing must be understood and accepted by your peers or it's worthless'. That'

If you look at the opposite, shame as a strategy, it's basically 'whatever you're doing must be understood and accepted by your peers or it's worthless'. That's a kind of heuristic, yes, but it's got problems. I do an open source project called Airwindows. It's basically coding, but I'm not much of a coder. It's a (long) series of DSP effects put out as MIT open source, and I'm branching out into creative commons sample libraries: been doing this for years. Sometimes the stuff I do sounds amazing, but it doesn't have visual interfaces or marketing etc to properly productize it, and it raises a lot of eyebrows. The thing is, I'm a designer, not a programmer. I struggle with porting tasks and keeping the coding environments working properly, and don't have the training for many things, but I have intentionality and a direction to go in, so I've made hundreds of plugins for people to use (or indeed re-work into their own things: MIT license). I also save a lot of time and energy not having to make each plugin meet particular standards or look spiffy, and that turns into workflow. So the shamelessness question becomes, 'should I be so ashamed of my work not acting like other people's developed products, that I should stop doing it?' and the answer is nope: and I've learned a lot of interesting things about that, not least the fact that people will pay for the polish and chrome of a thing way out of proportion to functionality, and will pay for your effort to meet them where THEY are at. To do stuff that is where I am at is sustainable, but it's not a big marketing win. This is an acceptable trade-off when I cannot produce the same kind of results others (in proper companies, with dedicated programmers etc) are able to produce. I guess shamelessness is genuinely good when there are some aspects of your stuff that are worth having, and you're not capable of following through and making ALL aspects exactly the way society expects them to be. You also get the bonus of eccentricity: when everything's the same, it's boring, but willful difference is often just annoying. When it's authentic, that becomes kind of a nice thing to have around :)