On Friday, February 9, Chef held our first Community Summit in Berlin at the Betahaus coworking space. Berlin has a thriving startup culture and is home to some of our InSpec teammates as well as a number of #cheffriends at AWS who work on OpsWorks for Chef Automate. Attendees included Chef partners Endocode and Kinvolk, as well as folks from Austria, Poland, Belgium, and the UK.
Over the years, we’ve experimented a bit with the format for our various Community Summits. Here in EMEA, we host a two-day Community Summit in London every autumn that features structured talks in the morning and Open Spaces in the afternoon. For our first event in Berlin, we hosted a single day of Open Spaces to help the community get to know each other and for us to learn more about them.
Chef, InSpec, and Habitat were all included in the selected topics for the Open Space sessions. Folks were particularly interested in the Upgrading Chef session with our engineering manager Thom May. Chef 14 is planned for release in April so this is an important topic to start discussing and preparing for now. Chef engineer, Tim Smith, led two sessions about resources in Chef and writing custom resources. While there are a lot of resources in Chef already, the community helps us determine if there is something we haven’t thought of yet!
One of the additional benefits of being in Berlin is that it’s almost Habitat’s home away from home. There are several active Habitat users and contributors in the Berlin area, so this was an opportunity for everyone to see a bit more about how Habitat is used in the wild and talk about how it can be used to solve complex problems. Paul Adams, a long time member of the Habitat community, gave an impromptu training on how to work with the Habitat core plans. He talked a bit about his most recent experiences with Habitat and PHP, which he also wrote about here. Another prominent Habitat community member, Blake Irvin of smartB, led a discussion on how to handle working with modules and components in interpreted languages like Python. He spoke about his experiences using Habitat in production at our London Summit in October 2017 and on the DevOps Chat podcast in December.
Overall, the one-day Summit was a great success! Our next planned Community Summit will be held with ChefConf in Chicago in May, and we’d love to see everyone there. In the meantime, if you’re in Berlin, you can share your Chef, InSpec, and Habitat stories with the Berlin community via the Berlin Chef Meetup, organized by the folks at Endocode.