I just had my one year anniversary with Chef (July 15th) and I’ve been reflecting on what a change that has been for me.

I started at Chef as a Technical Community Manager, where my primary role was to talk and train about Chef, DSC, PowerShell, and all the things that go into being successful with configuration management.

After my first month getting my feet on the ground, actually using Chef and meeting my team and others at Chef, I started hitting conferences and events. From TechMentor, to PowerShell Summit EU, to USENIX LISA, to TechEd EU with a couple of Chef Community Summits and other events, I got to talk to lots of folks about DSC, PowerShell, and even Chef. ;)

Then, at the start of 2015, just shy of 6 months on the job, we had some restructuring in the company and my team, the communuity team, had a bit of a change up. Some of the community team went to marketing, some went to services, and one of my coworkers and I remained in what became the Community Engineering Team. We gained a few more team members in that restructuring and my role was changed, from Technical Community Manager to Software Development Engineer. Since then, we’ve had a few additions to our team. We got an engineering lead and formed a Supermarket engineering team.

With that change, I’ve fallen into one of the most perfect positions I could have asked for. I’m charged with being an open source developer for Chef, identifying projects as needs arise and working with development teams across Chef. I, along with my team, also are responsible for being the face of Chef engineering in the community. We do things like helping PRs get merged, making it easier to contribute to Chef projects, and helping the right feedback and issues get surfaced. I also get to continue sharing what I’ve learned at conferences around the world.

I’ve been fortunate to have had a great series of roles (including getting to work at Stack Exchange - which was totally awesome), but I can’t imagine a better fit for me. So, thank you Chef for a great (and busy) year, and I’m looking forward to the challenges in this next year.