What’s For Me at ChefConf 2019: Community!

Oh man. What a week at Chef! Hopefully, you’ve seen our announcements about open sourcing our projects and changing our business model. We’ve been working on that for a while, and it’s been great to finally get to share it with you and start engaging open-source first.

ChefConf has always been the real-life place for our community to gather, hang out, learn from each other, work together, and find out what we’ve been working on and planning. This year is no different, and we’re looking forward to seeing folks and engage with them around all of our projects. We include a Chef Community Summit on the “Day 0” of ChefConf – this year that will be Monday, May 20 at the Hyatt Regency in Seattle.

Our Community Summit is run as Open Spaces – it’s up to the group what the topics of discussion are and we self-organize on the day. If you’ve never been in an Open Spaces event, it probably sounds a little crazy! But it really gives everyone a chance to find like minds among the folks at ChefConf and have informal discussions on whatever is on their minds.

The keynotes and breakouts provide more traditional conference content – prepared talks by members of the community, our users, our customers, and folks who have inspiring ideas for modern technology organizations. Attendees get a first look at our plans for our product roadmaps, new features, and releases, as well as experience stories from the field about how Chef Infra, Chef InSpec, and Chef Habitat are being deployed by organizations all over the world.

Want to get hands-on? Stick around for the hack day on Thursday, May 23, and work alongside our community on projects and issues that you choose!

In the breakouts this year, we’ll be featuring some members of our community, digging into the deepest parts of our projects to give you the best practices and experiences for your automation.

Writing Better Cookbooks with Testing

Chef’s Tim Smith runs our Developer Meetings in Slack every Thursday. This year at ChefConf he’s going to present Writing Better Cookbooks with Testing on Wednesday, May 22 at 4pm in room 401:

Automated infrastructure allows us to move fast, but moving fast is scary without proper testing. Where to start though? The state of the art in Chef cookbook testing has changed rapidly in the last few years with the introduction of new and improved tools and much of what you’ll find in web searches is often outdated.

This presentation will give a brief overview of resource-driven cookbook design and then dive into how to test resources within cookbooks. Cookbook linting, unit testing, and integration testing using Cookstyle, ChefSpec, and Test Kitchen / Inspec will be covered with a particular emphasis on ChefSpec unit testing and InSpec integration testing.

The Hard Way: Lessons Learned From the Sous Chefs Community

Sous Chefs play an important role in maintaining and curating a variety of cookbooks in the Chef ecosystem. Joel Holsten will talk about some of their experiences on Wednesday, May 22, at 2pm in room 502, The Hard Way: Lessons Learned From the Sous Chefs Community.

Your Chef Run Demystified. Compile Time Versus Run Time

Long time community member Aaron Kalin returns to ChefConf this year with his talk, Your Chef Run Demystified. Compile Time Versus Run Time on Wednesday, May 22 at 5pm in Quinault on the 5th Floor. The difference between compile time and run time can be really confusing, but very powerful when you understand how to use it well:

As you start writing more Chef cookbooks you’ll eventually come across the paradox of compile time versus run time. What is it exactly and why does it matter? We’ll dive into a little bit of Chef architecture to understand the differences and explore our options to common issues with examples.

Lessons Learned from Chef Release Engineering (What is Expeditor?)

Maybe our recent announcements have you curious about how Chef builds our software. Tom Duffield and Scott Hain will take you through a bit of that in their talk, Lessons Learned from Chef Release Engineering (What is Expeditor?) on Wednesday, May 22 at 3pm in room 401:

At Chef, our entire release process is defined as code. This allows us to automate repeatable tasks and reduce the burden on our maintainers. In this talk, we’ll cover how we accomplish this, the journey that led to the creation of Expeditor, and how our processes have improved as a result.

We’ll also have breakouts on our latest feature releases and our roadmap. You’ll be able to use our mobile app to plan your own schedule.

There’s all this going on, and plenty of time to kick back and have fun with the folks in our community – like you! Tuesday night will be our game night in the Hyatt, where we’ll be providing board games and a place to play, and you can bring your games along as well. D&D? Magic the Gathering? Exploding Kittens? Settlers of Catan? We’ve got you.

But the big event is Wednesday night at the historic Paramount Theatre in Seattle. Just when your brain is ready to explode from two days of talks and community it’s time to let it out and party with Mudhoney and Deep Sea Diver (OMG!). It’s quintessential Seattle, and not to be missed!

Get your tickets today. Use the code SummitChef19 to get a ticket for the full conference and the Community Summit (on Monday, May 20) for a discounted rate of $595!  

Mandi Walls

Mandi is Technical Community Manager for Chef. She can be found online @LNXCHK.