This is the second in a series of posts that tell the behind-the-scenes story of the Chef Community Cookbooks Survey—how the project began, the science behind it, and what the results showed. In this post, we talk to Dr. Nicole Forsgren about how she developed and validated the survey.

At ChefConf 2015, members of the Chef community received an invitation to participate in the Chef Community Cookbooks Survey. The survey was designed by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Chef’s Director of Organizational Performance and Analytics, who is also a recognized expert on tool use, DevOps, and IT performance, particularly among technical professionals like sysadmins and developers.

Chef is everywhere, or at least we try to be. From DevOpsDays to reInvent, meetups to ChefConf, to the constant stream of field engagements, success engineering projects, trainings, and much more, our team is out there and engaging with every aspect of the Chef community and the broader IT industry on a daily basis.

By now, hopefully all of you know we have Chef Community Summits in Seattle (Oct. 14-15) and London (Nov. 3-4) this Fall. Always some of the most engaging events of the year for the Chef Community, the Summits are organized as facilitated Open Space events.

Recently at Chef we moved to Slack for our internal messaging and collaboration tool. While this was awesome for us, our analytics product, Chef Analytics, had integrations written specifically for our old tool, Hipchat.

Manage 1.18.0 is now available from the Chef download site. With this release Manage will now respect the “`strict_search_result_acls“` setting if it is set on the Chef server. When this setting is enabled the Chef server search functionality does ACL permission checking before returning results.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Chef Analytics 1.1.5. This is a bugfix release for 1.1.4, which prevented some customers from cleanly upgrading from previous versions of Analytics. This version also includes a scheduled task (cron job) that will purge Analytics data older than three months by default on an ongoing basis.

Chef Server 12.1.2 is now released. This is a bug fix release which fixes installing remote add-on packages via the chef-server-ctl install command on apt systems. You can get the updated package here. Upgrade instructions are located here.

Hello again! I mentioned in my intro blog that, before coming to Chef, I was an academic, and I am actively researching the ways tech professionals choose and use technology. A large part of that effort is writing and publishing peer-review research.