The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (The MADE) in Oakland, CA is a one-of-a-kind place offering gamers of all shapes and sizes and opportunity to relive the milestones of gaming history and participate in epic tournaments, while kids can learn programming for free and get initiated into gaming culture.
It is at The MADE where you’ll find countless classic games donated by the Chef Community‘s very own Miah Johnson. An avid gamer herself (Borderlands 2 being her current favorite), Miah is also a prolific Chef Cookbook contributor. Miah’s joy of programming translates into both dynamite Chef code and a passion for game design, play, and culture.
In other words, whether at work or at play, Miah’s having a blast.
What’s more, the Chef Community gives Miah the same camaraderie and friendly interaction she finds in online game rooms, further intertwining her love for programming and interest in gaming – and helping drive her invaluable contributions to Chef itself.
Miah’s career in IT operations has spanned a diverse range of organizations and industries, where she’s done it all from system administration of traditional Linux infrastructure, to systems engineering at the now infamous Stanford Financial Group (ask Miah about her time there and you’re bound to hear a crazy story or three), to most currently being an Operation Engineer at Simple Finance. The common thread throughout her career has been Miah’s interest in helping people solve the challenges of managing infrastructure. However, her experiences with CFengine and Puppet left her wanting more. More scale. More flexibility. More community.
It only makes sense then that when Miah came across Chef in 2011, she’d found her tool of choice for even the hardest infrastructure problems.
“I’m a visual thinker, so Chef’s ‘blueprint’ approach to infrastructure makes a lot of sense to me, plus Ruby is easy, especially with previous experience,” Miah commented. “I first deployed it with AWS and it was so flexible I could do basically whatever I needed to.”
Miah soon dug into the Chef Community and found it to be welcoming, very friendly and… still young. When she tested a few Community recipes in her environments, she had to rewrite a good deal of code. However, as Miah began trying out and fixing more cookbooks, she realized what she was doing to help herself could likely help others.
“The Community has matured a lot since 2011. Back then many of the Community cookbooks didn’t translate as well to other environments. To make my life easier I started fixing them,” Miah continued. “Then, I realized, ‘Hey, I should share these.’ So I did and the feedback – whether new ideas or other approaches or just ‘thanks’ – has been tremendous. I love helping people on the IRC solve problems and collaborate with others looking to do the same.”
Miah has become prolific on the IRC and Chef Community for delivering rock-solid code, including her popular Redis cookbook. What’s more, she’s taken the next step and started presenting her knowledge to the Community, including most recently at this year’s ChefConf:
“Managing Resources and Their Providers”
Having already made a major impact on Chef and the Community, you can be sure Miah’s just getting started. Be sure to say hello at this year’s Community Summit and catch her gaming online or rebuilding an ultra-rare 1966 Steyr-Daimler-Puchbicycle.
Game on, Miah!