We're skipping January this time due to travel schedules not aligning, but will be back February 22nd with an awesome meetup! 

Ever wish you had a Chef sitting next to you so you can ask that burning question? 

Perhaps you've been banging your head against a wall on something technical and wish a Chef was sitting next to you to help?

Have you wished you had a Chef's ear to express how much you love, or maybe don't love, using Chef?

Maybe you're new to Chef and config management and want to bounce some questions or ideas off of people who do this stuff for a living?

Well, now you can! This time we're bringing in a panel of Chefs for Q&A / AMA (Ask Me Anything) and then we'll break out and help you work through any issues you may be experiencing with Chef products, recipes, pipelines, and even DevOps transformation. So start thinking about questions you'd like answered or things you'd like to discuss or work on and bring it on! We're here to help you and make you successful!

This is a great opportunity to meet some Chefs from different areas within Chef and get answers and help! Join us!

Chef Panel

Irving Popovetsky - Principal Customer Architect

Daniel Martushev - Field Solutions Architect

George Miranda - Director of Product Marketing

Eric Maxwell - Success Engineer

Morgan Drake - Inside Solutions Architect 

Tim Smith - Community Engineer

Kaivalya Hanswadkar - Director, UX Design

MORE TBA

Food / Drink

As usual, pizza (gf & vegan options too!), beer, cider, and non-alcoholic beverages will be provided. 

From http://leancoffee.org/:
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Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated.
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Join us for our monthly gathering to discuss everything from incident response to cross-team collaboration to automation frameworks. Food provided. Please RSVP!

This month: LIGHTNING TALKS!

DevOps Preppers

Sure, the odds of you meeting your demise from a zombie bite are pretty much zero, but pretending it could happen isn’t completely worthless. This talk will walk through how a prepper thinks, how that mindset can be extended via the Incident Command System, and how you can use iICS for non-zombie-based risks.

Tiffany Longworth is a Site Reliability Engineer at Puppet. She has launched successful projects large and small, but has also worked on projects that were spectacular failures! She likes using her background as a Marine, her training as an English teacher, automation, and cat gifs as much as possible.

So you want to switch to microservices?

The hype cycle around microservices often glosses over the real challenges that engineering teams face when trying to migrate away from monolithic applications. In this talk, we'll discuss code architectures and strategies that can help guide your codebase's transition from mono to micro.

Matt Greensmith is the Operations Engineering Manager at Cozy, where's he's responsible for a lot of nouns that end in "ity," like reliability, observability and security. In a past life he was simultaneously a call center rep, a bingo caller and a wedding DJ, so you know he likes to talk.

A Brief History of Schedulers

What do schedulers do for us, how has that changed over time, and why should we care? We'll discuss the historical context that gave rise to early schedulers, and take a look at the state of such tools today.

Kate has been in software engineering for almost a decade, having worked in areas ranging from power grid resiliency to fintech to enterprise software. Kate has managed a variety of teams across the devops spectrum at New Relic and Simple, and is now at HashiCorp helping build tools for other companies and teams to manage their own infrastructure.

What DevOps can teach you about starting a business (and why spreadsheets are everything)

I went from devops to starting a magazine and was happy and dismayed that many of the same skills apply to both. What happens when you don’t have time for structuring databases, building a custom front-end, or maintaining any real code? Well, there’s a lot you can do with a spreadsheet.

Audrey Eschright is a writer, community organizer, and software developer based in Portland, OR. She's the publisher of The Recompiler, a feminist technology magazine. Previously she founded Calagator, an open source community calendaring service which has been actively used in the Portland tech community for ten years as of this month. Her work on community safety and codes of conduct is used by user groups and open source projects around the world.

Pair Programming/Problem Solving

Pair programming is a practice a lot of engineers know about, few profess to enjoy and everyone has an opinion about. Let’s take a look at how to use it regardless of your role and leverage it to shift our perception of effective problem solving.

Logan Davis is a software developer. He’s shipped a lot of code and some of it was pretty good. He believes in fostering an inclusive culture focused on solving problems in a healthy way. Logan currently is a software engineer at InComm Digital Solutions.

*****

Risky Business

As we operate production systems they inevitably fail. As they fail and fail and fail again we as operators start to identify the way they fail and we know the causes of the failures. What if we could see the future and predict failures before they happen. We're going to explore using techniques to identify risks and how to present the risks to engineering and business stakeholders.

Jesse Dearing enjoys spending time with his family, bicycling, and working on small projects around the house and in Open Source. During working

Presentation and discussions about Chef at the Workday office in Beaverton.

Food and beverages will served.

Agenda:

6pm-6:30pm Arrive and mingle - Enjoy food and beverages

6:30pm-7pm "Reducing Cost & Risk via Automation with Terraform on AWS" presented by Chris Dunlap- Sr. Solution Engineer @ HashiCorp

Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. This talk will focus on how customers can leverage Terraform to eliminate unnecessary cloud spend by 30-40% and reduce risk by baking guardrails and best practices into their automation.

7pm-7:30pm "Intelligent decisions about cloud usage with Cloudability’s FinOps platform" presented by Patrick Zumar- Senior SE @ Cloudability

A new operating model for the cloud, called FinOps, is emerging that enables a shift — a combination of systems, best practices and culture — to increase an organization’s ability to understand cloud costs and make tradeoffs. In the same way that DevOps revolutionized development by breaking down silos and increasing agility, FinOps increases the business value of cloud by bringing together technology, business and finance professionals with a new set of processes.

FinOps has several fundamental building blocks we’ve seen high performing organizations put in place to gain competitive advantage. Patrick Zumar will share what we’ve learned from guiding hundreds of large and small cloud adopters on their journey to adopt FinOps.

7:30pm-8pm Networking