Brian talks with Nathen Harvey (@nathenharvey, Community Manager @chef) about how he became a Community Manager, his passion for DevOps, The Food Fight podcast, the future of configuration management and the best first steps to developing the skills to build infrastructure-as-code at your company.



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Links from the show:


Chef Homepage
Learn Chef
Nathen's Blog
Nathen on GitHub
The Food Fight Show (podcast)


Topic 1 - Tell us about your background and how you evolved into doing Community Management - and what does community management mean for a mix of open source and commercial “stuff”?

Topic 2 - We listen to Michael Ducy’s Goat Farm podcast, and hear a number of people from Chef speak at various events. It feels like what Chef is focused on is more about hands-on cultural change than technology. Is that a fair assessment of how it’s evolving?

Topic 3 - I heard you speak recently at a Triangle DevOps event about Infrastructure-as-Code, which is a big concept, but it’s grounded in actual technology. But that topic always gets wrapped up in DevOps and all these other analogies (Unicorn, Goats, etc..). Does that get old for you, or is it just the nature of working on stuff that’s trying to change 20yrs of previous habits and culture? 


Topic 4 - Let’s talk about config management. There’s this new believe/buzz that maybe Docker eliminates the needs for previous config-mgmt system. Why are we hearing that discussion, and what are the broader realities of config-mgmt (and Infrastructure as Code)?

Topic 5 - I feel like we have a big problem brewing, if this Cloud Native apps (Microservices, 12-Factor, etc.) stuff takes off, because a lot of the principles of DevOps are so foreign in today’s Ops teams. What do you recommend to people to get to learning and doing things “the right way” more quickly?