A few weeks after joining Chef in 2014, I attended ChefConf for the first time. The introductory keynotes from Barry Crist (Chef’s CEO) and Adam Jacob (Chef’s CTO) really touched a nerve with the strong focus on empathy and delightful experiences.

The Chef community is full of many awesome individuals who contribute and do exceptional things every day. Each year at ChefConf, three individuals are awarded the Awesome Community Chef award.

You may have seen the news about our new Seattle work space.  It sits on the Seattle waterfront across from what was Pier 52 and is now the Coleman Dock and home to West Seattle, Bainbridge, and Vashon ferries. We’re nestled in a perfect spot between downtown and the historic Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle.

I want to share an internal email that for me really captures both the spirit of Chef’s culture of inclusiveness and the giving nature of our employees.

This post originally appeared on SysAdvent Growing up, every Christmas time included the sweet smells of fresh baked cookies. The kitchen would get incredibly messy as we prepped a wide assortment from carefully frosted sugar cookies to peanut butter cookies. Holiday tins would be packed to the brim to share with neighbors and visiting friends.

This is an excerpt from a recent posting on the Cupfighter blog, authored by the team at Schuberg Philis. This entry digs into using Chef with Microsoft Powershell DSC and comes from Chef contributor and Schuberg Philis engineer Bob van den Heuvel.

Today we have released a new version of the Reporting Add-on 1.2.2 which includes database schema changes to deal with creating partitions for 2015 and additional indexes to improve performance. We recommend all users upgrade to this release to help with both scalability and performance.

Available for immediate download are Chef Server 12.0.1 and Enterprise Chef Server 11.2.6. This release addresses CVE-2014-8144, a CSRF vulnerability found in doorkeeper, a gem used by the oc-id service that ships with the Chef Server. This release updates oc-id to the latest version, 0.4.4, which contains the patched doorkeeper gem.

ChefConf 2015 is the largest, most vibrant gathering of web-scale IT and DevOps leaders, practitioners, and innovators. Featuring three days of inspired discussions, collaborative presentations, technical training, and hands-on labs focused on automating infrastructure and the continuous delivery of applications. Join us in Santa Clara, CA from March 31 to April 2, 2015 for ChefConf.