Happy Birthday, Habitat! Last night marked Habitat’s first birthday party, celebrated with the project’s core team, which flew from their various distributed locations, local community members, and friends of the project.

Delivering more things, more quickly, is the challenge that companies are tackling through digital transformation. This transformation involves adopting new technologies, processes, organizational structures, and, in most cases, dramatic cultural changes. It is made more difficult because many of the processes and structures being replaced were created to support specific technology choices.

One of the challenges in implementing DevOps practices and processes is spreading collaboration beyond developers and operations engineers. At InformationWeek’s Interop ITX conference last month, Nathen Harvey, our VP of Community Development, pointed to one reason many organizations struggle. It’s right there in the name. I hate the word DevOps.

Hopefully our previous blog and discourse posts have given you some general understanding around the way we govern the Habitat project. But, as a group of people hoping to share what we’re building with a larger audience we know we can always be doing more to “pull back the curtain”.

One month ago, we launched a new learning site for Chef practitioners called Learn Chef Rally. The release was a very exciting moment for our team and we were thrilled to share it all with many of you at ChefConf 2017. We debuted a completely revamped website, with 12 tracks and over 50 modules.

The community of Chefs at ChefConf 2017 took full advantage of our on-site certification exams. All told, we delivered over 300 exams. Many people took multiple exams and we had 9 people pass the required three exams to become a Certified Chef Developer.

Everyone who participates in the Chef Community does exceptional things on a regular basis. This work is worthy of celebration and stands as a testament to the way our community comes together to ensure all members are successful, together.

A super common question that comes up in lots of FOSS communities is “How do I contribute?”. While most projects have a file like a CONTRIBUTING.md or instructions in a README on how to join in on the open source fun, this question still gets asked quite frequently.

How can you ensure that your systems are secure without slowing down your deployments? Use Chef Automate for compliance. Chef Automate compliance is a solution that allows you to assess your infrastructure’s adherence to compliance requirements and to monitor that infrastructure on an ongoing basis.