Chef was born in the open source community and has always had a foundation in open source. As the company, community, and framework have grown, so has the commitment to our community.
As we work with our customers, we are finding that many are adopting and emulating some of the same behaviors they see in the open source community. Others want to. All have similar goals: building fast, efficient, and innovative software-driven organizations.
No single person is responsible for our community, or for ensuring that we (as a company, and as a community) are as great as we can be. However: if I had to pick only one person to rally us around, only one person to personify all that we can be if we strive to be our best selves, and the thereby create the kind of community everyone would be proud to be a part of, I would choose Nathen Harvey.
With that in mind, today we are appointing Nathen Harvey as our Vice President of Community Development. Nathen has been working in the open source community for nearly a decade and is a three-year Chef veteran. While at Chef, Nathen has been responsible for leading ChefConf, the Chef Community Summits, and countless community and training events. Additionally, Nathen leads a team of Community Engineers who are developing projects along with the community.
In this expanded role, Nathen will continue to drive and implement Chef’s open source strategy. He will also help our customers embrace and adopt community building processes that lead to greater collaboration and high velocity teams.
As our sixth Chef Community Summit kicks-off this week in Seattle, we are also starting the process of selecting the initial members of the Chef Board of Governance (CBGB). This governance board will advise on matters related to supporting the long-term governance, structure, and roadmap of the Chef Project.
Prior to joining Chef, Nathen was the Web Operations manager at CustomInk. Prior to CustomInk, Nathen was a board member and held various positions at VisualCV. Nathen is the co-host of the Food Fight Show Podcast and has been co-organizing the DevOpsDC Meetup for the past four years. Nathen holds a BA from the University of Maryland and enjoys closed-loop farming and fresh eggs.
