Pauly Comtois is the VP of DevOps at Hearst Business Media. Before that, he was Chef’s own VP of IT Operations.

We are happy to announce the release of the Chef analytics 1.1.0 package (`opscode-analytics-1.1.0`). `1.1.0` is the new production release, and has many new features over the `1.0.x` series. You can download the release from the Chef analytics download page.

Since the launch of Supermarket there has been the occasional question about how quickly the download counts grow for any given cookbook. In fact, if you upload an empty cookbook, it will quickly have greater than 10,000 downloads.

The beginning. Welcome to the first of a series of blog posts that describe Standard Bank of South Africa‘s DevOps journey. This series describes how Standard Bank is transforming its delivery process to provide new features and services at velocity. Standard Bank is the largest bank in Africa.

Hi Chefs, Today we released ChefDK 0.3.6. This release includes a bunch of new stuff: * Custom generator cookbooks can now be configured in your config.rb/knife.rb * `chef generate` will now generate ChefSpec tests for new recipes, and ServerSpec tests when a kitchen.

San Francisco’s largest tech event series, DeveloperWeek, is back in a major way this year, bringing more than 4,000 attendees together to hack, build, collaborate, learn, and, of course, party. From a 1,000-person hackathon (Accelerate 2015) to GirlDevWeek, DeveloperWeek 2015 is packed to the brim with awesome events and dynamic content.

A Brief Note Before we get started, it’s worth mentioning that even though I’m going to pretend Chef is a scripting language, a Chef runlist describes the desired final state of a system, rather than providing a list of actions to execute.

Ohai Chefs, We’ve just released Chef 11.18.0. This release includes the following changes: ## 11.18.0 * Fix an issue where knife could load commands from a different version of chef in ChefDK. ChefDK #227 * Removed dependencies on the ‘json’ gem, replaced with ffi-yajl. Use Chef::JSONCompat library for parsing and printing.

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.