ChefConf 2013 recap

We will be doing a recap of ChefConf 2013! For those who were unable to attend ChefConf 2013 from April 24-26 in San Francisco, come to the next Chef-NYC meetup to hear some of what transpired!

We will have video footage from the conference, as well as these two presentations:

Treating Your Infrastructure Like Garbage by Mike Fiedler

In the day and age of Cloud providers and new and freaky datastores, how elastic can our infrastructure really be? Does it really live up to the hype? In this session, we will show how we can take nothing but some code and Cloud account, we can build an entire app stack, and produce results. We'll also destroy pieces of the stack, and heal them!

Mike Fiedler is a long-time systems engineer, building a variety of platforms with all technologies. Currently the Director of Technical Operations at Datadog, he focuses on delivering scalable platforms with short turnaround times via automation. He contributes to Chef, Ops School, Vagrant, Veewee, and many other open source projects. Sometimes he writes a few of his own. When he's not working, he's a roller derby referee and licensed skydiver.

Beginning Chef Antipatterns by Julian Dunn

Chef is a sophisticated and powerful tool for system & application configuration management. But as a newbie Chef, you might be finding all that power overwhelming. You might also be looking to avoid making mistakes that you'll need to recover from later, or architectural design problems that might impact your ability to make changes quickly.
Come hear a newbie Chef talk about the things he did right when first learning Chef, and all the kitchen fires he caused by doing things wrong. By doing so, you can learn from disasters and avoid making the same mistakes. I'll also do a survey of the tools and workflow that we've gradually developed to keep our operations team working at its full potential.

Even if you've been using Chef for a while, you might still pick up a few tips for improving your workflow, organizing your Chef data, and working more efficiently with your team.

Julian Dunn is a consulting engineer with Opscode. His first experience with Chef was at SecondMarket, a New-York based alternative markets startup, where they graciously let him make — and fix — many of the mistakes described in this talk. He has over a decade of systems administration experience at outfits large and small, and promises a minimum of one LOLcat in his slide deck. When he's not helping customers with Chef, he enjoys good craft beer, indie music, and writing biographies about himself in the third person.

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The Meetup will be held in Brooklyn for the first time! You must RSVP in order to be on the list used by lobby security.

As always, refreshments will be served!