Congratulations Awesome Community Chefs 2020!

Hello Chefs! We hope you enjoyed ChefConf Online this week. It was a fun adventure creating a new experience for you since we couldn’t see everyone in person in Seattle.  If you missed any of the excellent content we assembled for you, please check out the videos at chefconf.io.

Not being able to meet in person is absolutely a bummer, but that hasn’t stopped us from celebrating a year’s worth of accomplishments by our own engineering team and by you, our community. Watch the Community Keynote in the ChefConf video-on-demand to learn more about what folks like Jason Field, Marc Chamberland, John Roesler, and Lance Albertson have been up to with projects like Sous Chefs and Cinc. If you’re new to the Chef Community, this is a great opportunity to learn a bit about what’s going on!

Also part of the Community Keynote, this year’s Awesome Community Chefs join a stellar group of folks who have brought so much to the community over the years. In case you are new to our community, the Awesome Community Chef awards are an annual set of awards that we give out to awesome members of our community. You can see our previous Awesome Community Chefs on our MVP page. 

These awards are specifically for people who have shown remarkable devotion to our community, have either been active in development of Chef’s Software, or working with folks who ask questions, or writing documentation. Each year we ask all of you: who out there is doing amazing stuff? Who’s helping you out on Slack and GitHub? Who’s making the contributions that set us all up for greater success with Chef, InSpec, and Habitat? The winners are nominated by our community, and it’s always an honor to be able to hand out these awards.

Please help us thank these folks for their contributions and their continuing dedication to the Chef Community!

Marc Chamberland, BobChaos

This legendary community member has spent an incredible amount of time helping people in the community slack. He seems to be online all the time! He’s friendly and helpful, and his knowledge of the Chef ecosystem is vast.

We absolutely miss him when he’s not around.

Bastien Jove, Tensibai

Tensibai basically runs the house on the community slack, especially during European business hours. He’s incredibly helpful and patient with the new folks.

If you have a question in the slack channel, Bastien is often the one who will help you out with an answer.

Lance Albertson, Ramereth

Lance crushes it in the community. He has greatly improved our OpenStack experience, is instrumental in Sous Chefs, and is a driving force behind Cinc. He’s also constantly around to make sure others are succeeding with Chef from those on community slack to students at OSU OSL.

You can also see Lance’s ChefConf session this year in the ChefConf video on demand list, Multi-Node Testing with Kitchen, Terraform, and Chef InSpec.

Mandi Walls, Lifetime Community Chef Award

This year we also awarded Mandi Walls with a Lifetime Community Chef Award. Mandi has worked for Chef for 8.5 years, and in that time has traveled to 29 different countries for Chef, logging more than a million miles in the air. She’s had 5 different positions inside Chef and lived in two countries, but no matter where she was, she always fought hard for the Chef Community. She is the first person to offer help in any situation, and has helped so many of us in the Chef Community to be better at what we do, and better humans. She is an absolute delight to work beside, and her unwavering commitment for doing good work inspires me daily. On behalf of the Chef Community, we thank you, Mandi.

Join the Community Slack

These folks and many more are here to help you out with your Chef Infra, Chef Habitat, Chef InSpec, Test Kitchen, and other questions. Or to just hang out and chat. Sign up for the Community Slack at community-slack.chef.io and join many fine and friendly folks doing amazing things. If you’re already there, thank @BobChaos, @tensibai, @ramereth, and @lnxchk for all that they do to make the Chef Community the place to be.