’21 Awesome Chef Awards

As part of this morning’s ChefConf keynote we announced the 2021 Awesome Chef award winners. These folks are nominated by members of the community as outstanding examples of the helpful, caring, engaged members that we want to see more of in the Chef community.

What are the Awesome Chef awards?

The importance of Chef’s community cannot be overstated, and the Chef community is full of awesome individuals who contribute and do exceptional things every day. The Awesome Chef awards are a way for all of us to recognize a few of the individuals who have made a dramatic impact on the Chef community, its ecosystem, its tools, or who have helped further the goals of improving DevOps globally.

Each year we solicit nominations from the entire community, asking for the names of people who have helped or improved the world of Chef in big and small ways, and the winners are announced at ChefConf. 

The Awesome Chef Awards have evolved since their inception, but in the current incarnation we get to recognize the amazing contributions of our community members (both internal AND external). We’ve given out Awesome Chef awards every year since 2013, and we’re excited to share this year’s winners.

The 2021 Award winners

Jeff Brimager

Jeff (@sam1el) is an outstanding contributor to both the internal AND the external Chef Community. He is always ready to offer help, and works tirelessly to make IT operators’ lives easier every day.

As part of the professional services team, he has an opportunity to help Chef users all over the world, and it shows.

Congratulations, and thank you Jeff.

Ben Hughes

Ben (@bmhughes) has long been a part of the Sous Chefs community, and this year he’s stepped up even more. He’s focused on a lot of Sous-Chefs cookbooks this year, and in particular the extremely difficult Vault cookbook wouldn't have been fixed without him!

He’s spent countless hours maintaining cookbooks that are critical to hundreds of companies that use Chef, helping with major cookbook rewrites and supporting Chef 17. He’s a fantastic help when folks have questions, always active on PRs and always willing to lend a hand. Overall, Ben is just a great guy to have in our community.

Congratulations, and thank you Ben.

Lamont Granquist

Lamont (@lamont-granquist) has been here since the "olden days" of Chef, hitting 10 years this year, and over and over again he proves his commitment to the project and to the community.

He is passionate about making the tool more powerful and the experience better and has put in the long hours to not just do that in code, but also show others where we should be moving. Chef Infra would be a very different tool without him, as his efforts have made it more powerful and more useful to all of us.

Congratulations, and thank you Lamont.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to all three new Awesome Chefs. You join a growing list of amazing humans that have contributed to this wonderful Chef community. We’re glad you’re here!

If you want to participate in the Chef community, one of the best places to start is community.chef.io. Then join us in the community slack to be part of the conversation!