On January 15, 2009 we announced Chef with a short and simple blog post. At the time, Opscode was nothing more than a handful of engineers toiling away inside of an old furniture store. We had no money, no marketing campaigns, and no logo.

Today we have a triple release of Chef, Ohai and Mixlib::Log, with more than 75 bug fixes, improvements, and new features. A Sharper Knife Chef 0.9.10 features many improvements to knife. One of the most exciting improvements comes courtesy of Doug MacEachern: a bootstrap script for windows.

It’s time for another Opscode Webcast! Date: Thursday, October 21, 2010 Time: 1:45 PM Pacific Presenter: Seth Chisamore (@schisamo) This webcast will assume the audience has signed up for the Opscode Platform and followed the getting started guide. Knife is Chef’s powerful command-line utility used for interacting directly with the Opscode Platform’s RESTful API.

In case you missed the webcast this morning, or want to review it again, we have posted the WebEx recording Also as promised, the guide that goes with the webcast is on the Help site. “This page describes how to build a simple Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack using Chef cookbooks provided by Opscode.

Opscode will be upgrading the search infrastructure of the Opscode Platform to provide improved performance and an enhanced query syntax on Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 from 7:00-9:00pm PST. The API and the Management Console may be unavailable for some or all of this time.

It’s time for another Opscode Webcast! UPDATE: Here is the Link to the previous session: ! Date: Thursday, October 14, 2010 Time: 10:45 AM Pacific Presenter: Joshua Timberman (@jtimberman) This webcast will assume the audience has signed up for the Opscode Platform and followed getting started guide. We will cover: Downloading cookbooks from cookbooks.opscode.

Mr. Devops ( Patrick Debois) and the Chef Ninja (Joshua Timberman ) will be teaming up to teach a Chef Fundamentals class is Europe.

By popular demand, I will run a second free Webex training session where I introduce Chef and show how to set up your organization on the Opscode Platform this Wednesday. Then on Thursday, John Willis will demonstrate an awesome, lightweight approach for user management with Chef.

Caleb Tennis is one of Chef’s earliest adopters, and has been submitting valuable patches to Chef since the early days of 0.7.0. He works at CloudBees, which aims to be the leading Java Platform as a Service.