Giving Thanks to the Chef Community

One of Chef’s strengths from day one has been in its incredible community. As we’ve expanded the number of open-source projects under our aegis in the last few years with InSpec and then Habitat, the Chef community has grown to encompass and embrace them. The meaning of “Chef community” and #cheffriends has therefore evolved to mean all those who use and participate in Chef’s open source projects — and not just the eponymous configuration management system.

Among our community there are a number of contributors who have gone above and beyond the call of duty, be that contributing a significant amount of code to our open-source projects, a track record of consistently responding to user questions, or helping new users get started with using our projects. At this time of year, when we are so thankful for our family and friends, we’d like to recognize these individuals by name. In alphabetical order:

  • Aaron Kalin. Aaron is a longtime Chef community member who continues to crush it. He’s always there to help new users on Slack and at Chef events. Recently he’s published some great blogs on testing and has begun live streaming his cookbook refactoring. 
  • Aaron Lippold. Aaron has been a driving force for InSpec in the community. Active in the community, active in GitHub, and active in providing clear and concise feedback in many channels. 
  • Chris Maher. Chris is also a noteworthy contributor to Habitat core plans and is always helpful to other Habitat users in Slack.  His smile and helpful attitude are an absolute asset to both the Habitat community and the Chef community as a whole. 
  • David Alexander. David is a key contributor to the InSpec code base and also very active in the Slack community with over 500 messages in the #inspec channel alone. 
  • Graham Weldon. Graham has been tremendously helpful with both the maintenance of existing Habitat core plans and the introduction of new ones.  His tireless contributions help keep core plans – which are the foundation of both Habitat and Automate, as well as any software packaged with Habitat – functioning and moving forward. 
  • Noel Georgi. Noel has had twelve significant pull requests (PRs) merged into InSpec 2.0 and 3.0. He is extremely active in the community, and in the words of our InSpec developers, “we trust him to speak in the best interests of InSpec in Slack.”
  • Romain Sertelon. Romain’s contributions to Habitat core plans are massive and legendary.  His deep attention to detail, positive attitude, and everlasting desire to help are a joy to have as part of the Habitat community. 
  • Tor Magnus Rakvåg. We are very thankful for Tor Magnus’ constant enthusiasm to improve the Windows Chef experience. Whether it’s a wishlist item we submit or something we comes up with on his own, he always jumps on ideas to improve resources or create new ones. Added bonus: His work is crazy well-tested, making it very easy to accept his contributions into the codebase. 
  • Trevor Vaughan. Trevor is a valued member of the InSpec community who finds bugs, open issues, engages on GitHub and helps many of our new and existing users in Slack.

On behalf of everyone at Chef and in the broad user community, I would like to extend our thanks to all of you. We will be in touch with instructions on how to receive a special and unique token of our appreciation.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Julian Dunn

Julian is a former Chef employee