Make your plans now to cook up awesome with us at #ChefConf 2014! This will be the largest and best #ChefConf yet and we’ve got some really amazing things planned for this year. A great set of workshops, amazing keynotes, and session tracks featuring awesome members of the community!

Chef was built from the beginning as an extensible framework that makes IT professionals’ lives easier. This extensibility has always led to interesting and exciting contributions from the community of Chef users. Innovative solutions for common challenges and process and tooling improvements help Chef users change the way IT works.

The Opscode Community Summit kicks off this week in Seattle. The Summit is an annual gathering of community members for two days of Open Spaces discussing the topics that are most important to the people in the community. Participants share their ideas, triumphs, and challenges with Chef and other personal projects.

We are looking forward to resuming our Chef Fundamentals Webinar Series this Thursday at 10am PT with Module 4: Understanding the chef-client run and using knife to learn about your Infrastructure.

November brings with it a bunch of opportunities to meet up with your fellow Chefs.

Hey Chefs, Today is an exciting day. We are announcing Chef Client 11.8.0 & Ohai 6.20.0. Here are the biggest highlights of these releases: Chef Client Local Mode Chef Client now has a local mode in which it can run 100% locally using a chef repository.

SSL and Chef As Chef has grown up, we've found that we've needed to revisit some decisions we made when Chef was an unruly upstart open source project. One such decision is how Chef handles HTTPS connections by default. Currently, Chef defaults to not verifying certificates when it makes HTTPS connections.

In Chef 11.8, we’re excited to introduce local mode with `chef-client -z`.

Our close friends at CustomInk make it easy for anyone to create customized T-shirts, sweatshirts, and much more online. (Sidenote: We work with them to make all our Opscode and Chef T-Shirts). CustomInk employs proprietary, primarily Ruby-based software applications running on both virtualized and cloud servers to manage everything from its website to its printers.