Happy New Year! Most people don’t care if a company wishes them greetings on a holiday (some even prefer one less email during a break). And most people don’t care much about how many employees a company hired or the number of new customers added in a given year. So we want to be respectful.

This post was originally published on the Hurry Up and Wait! blog on December 30, 2017. I do not come from a classical computer science background and have spent the vast majority of my career working with Java, C# and Ruby – mostly on Windows.

This post is part 3 of a 4 part series. Read Part 1 for an overview of the current state of the ecosystem, and Part 2 on Policyfiles.

There are lots of tech conferences. Each year more are born, grow, and clamor for your time, money, and attention. When we started ChefConf six years ago, we knew two things for sure — we wanted it to embody the best of our community, and because of that, it would have to be different.

On December 20th, I presented a live webinar on Writing Elegant Tests. Watch the recording below to hear me explain powerful RSpec features that you can use immediately to reduce code duplication, make your tests more expressive, and helpers that are exportable between all your cookbooks.

This post was originally published on the SysAdvent blog on December 21, 2017. Introduction Habitat by Chef is a framework for building, deploying, and running any kind of application. Chef’s blog has a good introductory series on the concepts behind Habitat, and the Habitat tutorial is a good place to start learning.

How does Chef handle patch management? The short answer is: it depends. For some organizations, patch management is simply a matter of running vendor-recommended updates on a fairly regular interval, while having the flexibility to install on-demand updates as vulnerabilities like 0-days require.

DevOps Culture Culture is a funny thing and it influences our lives quietly and constantly. It distinguishes us, binds us together, and gives us a sense of identity. We see couples develop their own cultures. Families have them. Towns, companies and industries all adopt or create cultures.

Chef webinars are a great way to learn about new products, integrations, and build your skills as a Chef practitioner. In 2016, we presented more than 30 live webinars to thousands of attendees across the globe.