Not yet confirmed for sure, but it looks like Oct 9th will be our first Bay Area Chef Hackathon. The folks from Opscode will be in town for some training and have suggested Oct 9th for a day of Chef Hacking.

The idea is that some or all of the folks attending have Chef Projects they would like to work on and get help from the community in real time. Its not to hack on Chef itself (though I guess that could happen too since its open source!)

We can have spontaneous mini-tutorials and brain-storming sessions on how to solve common problems as they come up.

One of the toughest problems I had when getting started was just getting oriented and getting some tips on how to bootstrap things and get the basics going.

Having a group of people + some real world tasks/problem + the Opscode trainers in the room will allow for some intensive learning.

Will have more info shortly. The location is most probably in Mt. View with a possibility of San Francisco. Let me know if you know of a good space for such an event.