Cloudy Journey: The Community Talks DevOps & Open Source at ChefConf [feedly]

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The Community Talks DevOps & Open Source at ChefConf
// Chef Blog

The Chef Community came alive at ChefConf in Austin last week with more than 1,500 passionate DevOps leaders, practitioners, and innovators meeting to talk infrastructure, applications, automation and driving business value through IT. Our CEO Barry Crist took the stage to talk about what it means to ship ideas in today's modern workplace. Our CTO and Co-founder Adam Jacob expressed the importance of designing technology with humanity in mind.

We heard many discussions about what it means to be a part of the DevOps community. But who better to tell you about those discussions than ChefConf attendees themselves!

What does it mean to practice DevOps?

"DevOps is the embodiment of process and improvements that other industries have learned, applied to IT and how companies can deliver value to customers." – Nirmal Mehta, Chief Technologist, Booz Allen Hamilton

"Alaska has always been an innovator looking to provide differentiated customer experience. In order to do that, you need backend tools that provide stability and the ability to push things out quickly." – Veresh Sita, CIO, Alaska Airlines

Why DevOps is the key to customer experience?

"Delivering on the final product is key. Your job's not done if the customer can't accomplish what they want. If the customer can't do it, it doesn't matter if your section of the code was good. The customer experience is all that matters." – Adam Mikeal, Director of Information Technology at the College of Architecture, Texas A&M University

What are the benefits to being part of an open source community?

"Open source is important because it's a community practice. It is building a people who are invested in driving a whole industry forward, not just our individual silos of information or product areas." – Naomi Reeves, Senior Engineer, Target

"When something is broken you want to be able to look under the hood and fix it. That's a key factor in open source. It helps you think better, contribute back to the community and fix bugs. It allows the community to experiment and build things – like GitHub – that didn't exist 10 years ago." – Matt Medeiros, Systems Engineer

Thanks for joining us at ChefConf – and if you weren't there – we hope you can meet us for next year's event. See you in May 2017, and until then, stay weird Austin!