Cloudy Journey: Awesome Community Chefs

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Awesome Community Chefs – 2017 Award Winners
// Chef Blog

Everyone who participates in the Chef Community does exceptional things on a regular basis. This work is worthy of celebration and stands as a testament to the way our community comes together to ensure all members are successful, together. During ChefConf, our annual community reunion, some individuals are recognized for the dramatic impact they have had on the community and our common cause of improving the practice of continuous automation. Four individuals were recognized as Awesome Community Chefs at ChefConf 2017.

Annie Hedgpeth

Annie (@anniehedgie) embraced a new career in technology and quickly became an extremely valuable member of the Chef, InSpec, and DevOps community. Using InSpec as a way to build empathy between security and operations teams, she has made the technology more accessible to everyone by documenting and speaking publicly of her journey. Many InSpec newcomers know of Annie simply because of her blog series that serves us well as an InSpec tutorial.

Annie is fantastic role model thanks to her honesty, humility, and infectious enthusiasm for learning. We are so thrilled she is part of our community.

Ben Dang

Ben (@bdangit) has been hacking in the community seemingly since the day Habitat was launched and the entire community will tell you that he's one of the most helpful individuals to work with. Ben isn't just helpful to new adopters, he also regularly works with the core team to identify and fix bugs, constantly weighs in on features/RFCs, and is in general a wonderful person to have around. Ben recently volunteered to join the Habitat Community Organizer Team as an advocate and we're super excited to have him as model for what we want the Habitat community to be.

Ben has been an absolutely incredible representative for the Habitat community; his care and feeding of new community members, the level of effort he has put towards making people feel welcome and heard, and his overall willingness to jump in and help at the drop of a (habi)hat are the reasons we're ecstatic about having Ben as an integral part of the community.

Sean O'Meara

Sean (@someara) really defined what it means to build cookbooks professionally. He single handedly maintained most of the core community cookbooks for years, helped to develop the library cookbook pattern, and introduced tools like kitchen-dokken to improve the testing process.

He's one of the most insightful and passionate members of our community, and his talks have lead many of us into the light.

Nell Shamrell-Harrington

Nell (@nellshamrell) is welcoming to all and shares her enthusiasm and skills with everyone who needs it. In addition to her work on making Supermarket a delight, Nell has also been a major contributor to the latest Habitat releases. Nell speaks at conferences, hosts webinars, writes blog posts, and has conversations with community members on the Food Fight Show podcast. Whether considering your first open source contribution or adopting the latest features of Habitat, Nell is there to help!

Congratulations and thanks are in order for this years Awesome Community Chefs. Take a minute to thank them on twitter, on github, or in person (maybe with a hug)!

Have someone you would like to nominate as an Awesome Community Chef for 2018? You can nominate them now!