Cookbook Styling with Julian Dunn

One of Chef's Senior Consultants, Julian Dunn, will be presenting on Cookbook Styling. Here's the abstract:

One of the best things about the Chef community is the wide assortment of various cookbooks to configure and manage servers. Often there are several cookbooks available to manage the same software. How do you know whether a cookbook is any good? And if you’re starting from scratch, automating something for the first time, how do you write a 'good' cookbook?

In this talk, I'll give my thoughts on cookbook style, focusing less on details ("should I use symbols or strings?") and more on general practices for what a good cookbook looks like. We'll take a quick tour through varied topics such as recipe size and structure, levels of abstraction and when they're appropriate, name-spacing, using libraries, unit testing (when and where), and more.

Additionally, we are hoping to have a few short field reports/presentations from ChefConf 2014. Please join us!