Yesterday, I attended Chef office hours that have been going on for a while and have even mentioned in my talk. For me, they are a good resource on figuring out some of the basic things I have missed to help me move forward. Yesterday was such a positive day that I felt the need to bring it up. In the course of an hour, I learned the following;
- That a plugin I was using was actually deprecated and I should stop using it.
- Several commands that helped me move through the command line more quickly.
- The location of several important pieces of Chef and how it was organized.
- The structure of RubyGems and how it might be making my workflow difficult. (Note I still don't understand, but at least i know that people share my pain)
- Learned a little bit about how to setup Vagrant boxes from Virtualbox images.
- How to set up nodes to ping the server for a updated recipes.
I was able to even give a little help as well. A fellow Chefffer on the call was asking about how to do continuous integration using Chef and Jenkins. It was a major affirmation that I could contribute and not just take time from Chef.
This last bit actually reveals one thing about Office Hours that is not really understood. Office hours are not only a good resource for people to get started learning the basics of Chef, but a collaborative area that if you can contribute if you need to. In the words of the guy who runs office hours, "I don't want to talk for 2 hours. I want it to be collaborative". Let's hope that we can get some senior guys in the mix and really teach people from a practical standoint.
Remember Cheffers, Office Hours are from 12:00-2:00 PM Pacific every Thursday. The link is below.
Keep calm and cook on.