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.

In 2016, we published more than 200 blog posts, highlighting major releases and announcements, partnerships and integrations, skill-building and how to articles, and more. Here are the top ten most viewed posts of 2016.

I’m happy to announce a new driver caching mechanism for Test Kitchen. You can use it with provisioners to cache downloads and other files between provisions. For people who use the kitchen-vagrant driver to run Chef, we’ve introduced local caching of the chef-client packages.

This is the fourth post in our series, Why Habitat? You can catch up with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. In our last post, we began covering the Habitat supervisor. We explored how it allows you to manage the runtime life cycle of your application.