On January 15, 2009 we announced Chef with a short and simple blog post. At the time, Opscode was nothing more than a handful of engineers toiling away inside of an old furniture store. We had no money, no marketing campaigns, and no logo. As of last week, Chef now has over 200 registered contributors, who have made over 1,000 individual commits.
At first, there were four other names on the Approved Contributors list: AJ Christensen, Bryan McLellan, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and Benjamin Black. Ezra was brave enough to incorporate Chef in Engine Yard’s offerings and to sing it’s praises publicly (and….err, suggestively). If it hadn’t been for Ezra pushing us to release, it would have taken a lot longer for the world to see Chef.
From there, our little project slowly but surely gained a following and names were added to the list: Joe Williams, Thom May, Edward Muller, Tim Dysinger, Sean Cribbs, Michael Hale, Mathieu Sauve-Frankel, Mark Imbriaco, Matthew Kent, Miguel Cabeça, Jason Jackson, Caleb Tennis, Scott Likens, Edmund Haselwanter, Cary Penniman, Diego Algorta, Ian Meyer, Tollef Fog Heen, Robert Berger, Doug MacEachern, Trotter Cashion, Dan Prince and many more. We owe them, and everyone on the list an incredible debt of gratitude.
Corporations put weight behind the project too – the list now includes corporate giants such as VMware and Rackspace, smaller (but fearsome)
shops such as Wikia and 37Signals, and thought leaders such as Basho and Peritor.
Today, these 200+ individual contributors and 50+ corporate contributors comprise the largest team of open source configuration management developers anywhere in the world. Chef and it’s community get more awesome every day, and we know exactly who to thank.
Our team at Opscode is both outnumbered and humbled.
Speaking for myself, I couldn’t be more proud to call so many of you my peers, and to have such an incredible network of talented, dedicated people who all care about infrastructure automation as much as I do. It continues to be an honor to associate with each and every one of you.
Love,
Adam and the rest of the Opscode Gang.