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On Joining Chef

As many of you in the Community have seen by now, I recently joined Chef as a Vice President (more on what in particular I will be up to in a minute).

I first came across the open source Chef project while working at ThoughtWorks, where we got to experiment with various new technologies in order to find the best solutions to solve our customers’ problems. Chef began to crop up more and more frequently in our internal discussions of which tools had been effective, and I was sufficiently impressed that it got a few mentions in the Continuous Delivery book that Dave Farley and I published in 2010.

Four years later, Chef — both the product and the company — is going from strength to strength. I have seen many companies use Chef’s platform to enable their move to continuous delivery, and I’m excited about our plans for the future. I am delighted to have the chance to be part of its evolution and growth — and to count among my colleagues some of the people I admire most in our community.

Now back to what I’ll be doing. My focus will be to grow a high velocity organization that delivers the most awesome customer experience in the industry. Organizational culture and development are topics that form the core of my forthcoming book, Lean Enterprise, and I am super excited that Chef has asked me to be part of further developing their high performance culture.

I’ll be writing periodic updates both here and at http://continuousdelivery.com/. You can also follow my progress on Twitter — and I’m hoping to make it to as many Chef community events as I can, starting with FlowCon in San Francisco.

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Jez Humble