Eric Wolfe received a Commodore 128 computer when he was just five years old and quickly became fascinated with playing games on this new machine. The joys of tinkering with that old Commodore took him through the next decade.

The date of our upcoming webinar with Adobe has been changed to Thursday January 23rd at 10am PST. Please join us if you are you interested in learning about how you can use Enterprise Chef to manage Amazon Web Services infrastructure at scale from the ground up.

Our own Nathen Harvey recently created a rockin’ and rappin’ (litterally) video presentation on what DevOps is – and is not – called “DevOps with Me!”. We could write a whole bunch of words about how unique and creative Nathen’s comparisons are here, but we’ll let you be the judge.

Computers have fascinated Jon Cowie since he was little. So much so, that he dreamed of being a developer from an early age after encountering BASIC in old Atari magazines. He pursued this dream all the way through university, where he attained a computer science degree in 2005. Then, something happened.

An early Christmas present for you! We’ve been rethinking how Chef can be used to bootstrap machines and create test environments, and an early prototype–the chef-metal gem–has come out of that thinking. The long explanation is here.

One of our goals here at Chef (née Opscode) is to make installing Chef on a new node as easy as possible so that you can start enjoying the benefits of automation with minimal delay. But what happens to nodes that stick around for extended periods of time?

This post was originally published on SysAdvent. Chef, nee Opscode, has long used Amazon Web Services. In fact, the original iteration of “Hosted Enterprise Chef,” “The Opscode Platform,” was deployed entirely in EC2.

That’s right, you only have two weeks left to get #ChefConf 2014 tix for $850. This super discount ends Dec. 31. So… Register today! Our third annual #ChefConf, goes down April 15-17, at the Hyatt Embarcadero in San Francisco.

This post was originally published on SysAdvent. One of the long standing issues with Chef has always been that changes we wanted to make to nodes weren’t necessarily instant.