[chef] Re: Community Summit and some personal thoughts

["Julian C. Dunn" < >]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Eric G. Wolfe 
<
 >
 wrote:

> The question was posed if there was an increasing tendency in
> introducing one's self at Chef events, such as the summit, by asking
> "Do you work for Chef?".  I was also asked, "How do you feel about
> that being repeatedly asked of you?" and "Do you think this attitude
> makes people uncomfortable?".

Hi Eric,

I personally did not experience this phenomenon, so I'm trying to
tease out what bothered you about it. Was it the implication that your
views carried more or less weight because you did (or didn't) work for
Chef Software, Inc.? Was it the perception that you were being
recruited to come and work for the company? Or is it something else?

As a Chef employee (who was a community contributor before I started
working here) I do find the increasing requests for an "official Chef
Software, Inc. position on X" to be annoying, as there is almost
always no such thing. However, I've tried to be empathetic about it,
and I've narrowed down the genesis of those queries to two factors:

1. There is genuine confusion about the various ways to do X that have
worked. This is often expressed as asking for "best practices".
2. Many folks in IT have long been told by their software vendors
exactly what to do, and they don't know how to deal with a vendor that
doesn't do that. Hence, some people are afraid to experiment for
themselves for fear that they'll "do it wrong" and that their vendor
will tell them "it's unsupported".

To point #2: I hope that we never become a company like that. If you
are using Chef, you are "supported". If you have a commercial
relationship with the company & call for help, we might recommend
optimizations that you could make, but we'll never say "you're doing
it wrong and you are unsupported".

To point #1: as a community (and as a company) we could do a better
job of documenting "things that worked for people" and collecting that
in a central place. Not quite sure what that place would be, but it's
almost like we need an IBM developerWorks for Chef.

- Julian