[chef-dev] Chef as a Community

[Bryan McLellan < >]

# Chef as a Community

If you've contributed to Chef, want to contribute, or just love it,
check out Adam Jacob's blog post "Chef as a Community" which provides
a history of the project and a call to action to figure out together
how to organize the project moving forward.

http://www.getchef.com/blog/2014/07/03/chef-as-a-community/

As a long time contributor, I'm really happy we're going to have this
conversation and I'm looking forward to what develops from it.

# Issue workflows and my love/hate relationship with them

At Chef Software, we've been working on migrating away from what we
call "Public JIRA" [1] (because we have another internal instance) to
GitHub Issues. Besides our own additional issue trackers, scrum and
kanban tools, there's been a lot of feedback from Chef users and
contributors that it was too confusing and time consuming using both
GitHub pull requests and JIRA for their contributions and issues.

We used JIRA heavily for workflows and queuing to sort through
contributions. For unintended reasons that Adam mentioned in his blog
post, a few of us at Chef Software ended up being the gatekeepers for
getting contributions reviewed and merged. One of the topics slated to
be discussed at our upcoming first developer meeting (also mentioned
in Adam's blog post) is "how a patch gets approved."

I personally want to ask folks to think about how we're going to stay
on top of pull requests; new ones, those with feedback, and stale
ones. These kind of workflows have been a big part of my life for the
last few years. Bring your thoughts to the meeting next Friday.

# Developer Office Hours

We're still getting together on Google Hangouts on Mondays and
Wednesdays at Noon Pacific Time/3pm Eastern Time. If you haven't been
to one before, come hang out. I've switched to tweeting these from
http://twitter.com/ChefOfficeHours ;(and I post them in #chef on
irc.freenode.net), so there's a more central twitter location for the
receiving hangout URLs. For now, the recordings are still at
https://www.youtube.com/user/opscodebtm until we can figure out how to
make a Google Apps/Youtube role account.

We've traditionally reviewed contributions in these meetings. That is
still the standing agenda, but if you'd like to come talk about
particular pull request, how to write tests, a feature idea, whatever,
please do. Since I live way out in the woods, it's a nice opportunity
to talk to my Chef friends too, so come and say hi.

# Learnchef Office Hours

By the way, I recently learned that some folks at another part of the
company have an open office hours for beginners on Thursdays at Noon
Pacific Time. If you've got some questions about using Chef, they can
help you out too. There's a form of some kind of magic that sends you
a URL here:

http://www.getchef.com/contact/office-hours-registration/

-- 
Bryan McLellan | chef | software engineer
(c) 206.607.7108 | (t) @btmspox | (www) http://getchef.com

[1] 
http://www.getchef.com/blog/2014/06/16/chef-issue-tracking-and-contribution-workflow-updates/