Congratulations to our 2019 Awesome Community Chefs

ChefConf 2019 has now come and gone. It was a week of learning, fun, and community.  One of our traditions at our annual gathering is recognizing community members who have made significant contributions or had a noteworthy impact on our projects and community. These are our Awesome Community Chefs, nominated by you, our community, in appreciation to the outstanding work they’ve done for all of us.

This year’s winners reflect the global reach of the Chef Community, as well as the multiple ways someone can have a positive impact in an Open Source community like ours. We are so grateful for all of their contributions to Chef Infra, Chef InSpec, Chef Habitat, and our related projects. Open Source projects thrive on contributions from new and veteran contributors, and we’re excited to recognize a few of them at ChefConf.

Karl Fischer

Karl Fischer

One of the hardest parts of being a global company of Chef’s size is having humans in places all over the world. As our community has grown, so has its geography.  Karl has been an amazing advocate in South Africa, helping us expand our message. He contributes across numerous projects in Chef Infra, Chef Habitat, and Chef InSpec. Karl shared his thoughts on community with us this year at ChefConf. You can view his presentation here.! Thank you, Karl!

Joshua Basch

Joshua Basch

Joshua Basch was nominated for his work on the Chef Habitat project. You can find him in the Habitat Slack, acting as an “awesome resource for the community”. A nominator described him as a true trailblazer for Chef Habitat. Young projects like Chef Habitat are super lucky to find contributors like Joshua to build enthusiasm and help them grow! Thank you, Joshua!

Graham Weldon

Graham Weldon

Graham has been a member of the Chef Community for a very long time. Another far remote ChefFriend, in Japan, Graham is helpful and enthusiastic. He’s been known to give impromptu Chef Habitat tutorials, just because. He is absolutely a key contributor to the Chef Habitat core plans, and he even spoke about them at ChefConf! Thank you, Graham!

Robb Kidd

Robb Kidd

Robb was our employee Awesome Community Chef this year. Robb has been a key member of our Community Engineering efforts, working on Supermarket and other projects that are central to success with Chef projects. In addition to being in the thick of it with our projects, Robb is a volunteer IRL, with 20+ years as an EMT in his community. Thank you, Robb!

Nathen Harvey – Lifetime Community Chef Award

Nathen Harvey

Finally, a special celebration this year, we award a Lifetime Community Chef award to Nathen Harvey. Nathen has been a tireless advocate for inclusive communities, and the Chef Community benefited immensely from his work for us. He met with thousands of ChefFriends over the years and hugged most of them. His work as a community leader encourages and empowers so many of our Chef Community members, even though he has a new home. To see Nathen in action, his ChefConf 2019 talk on using Chef Infra and GCP is up on our YouTube channel. We thank Nathen for all he has given to the Chef Community.

Huge congrats to our winners and a big thanks to the rest of our Community for making ChefConf such a success. Remember, these are nominated BY YOU, so if you know someone that should get this award, stay tuned for your opportunity to nominate them.

You can watch the presentations of the winners here.

To hear more about the Chef Community, and their impact on what we do at Chef, watch Nell Shamrell-Harrington’s Day 2 Keynote!

Mandi Walls

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