I remember it like it was yesterday. Wandering in to the #chef channel on the freenode IRC network and asking some naive questions. Recounting the story at ChefConf this year had me nearly in tears as I looked to the audience and saw great friends looking back at me who have helped me along the way in the Chef community. As the title suggests though, I’m approaching my seventh year and after a great deal of thought I have decided to hang up my Chef coat.

Now I’m not going to be walking away forever, but I will definitely be taking a few big steps back. Firstly, I will be removing myself as a FreeBSD maintainer in Chef. To be bluntly honest, I didn’t do much at all in my tenure there and the Chef employees always seemed to be a step ahead of me in contributions. Next, I will be winding down my support of Sous-Chefs which is a community led organization of cookbook maintainers. This also means I will be putting up chef-rvm for adoption and hope it goes to a good home.

I’m still dedicated to the Chef community via work, but my after hours will be less Chef and more other hobbies and pursuits. I’ve given a lot of my time, energy, and soul to the Chef community if anything as a thank you for helping launch my career into the DevOps space for the past 7 years. If it weren’t for them, I would have likely not landed the best job of my career at dnsimple. The world of DevOps is ever changing and it’s time I changed with it. I’m looking forward to getting more into Go as a language and involving myself more in the Hashicorp space who’s tools have eaten the DevOps world in the last few years.

I want to close by saying a huge, big THANK YOU to the folks in Chef who have made the last 7 years so much fun and I wish you the best of luck into the future. I’m also flattered to be mentioned in the thank you post from Chef and looking forward to the goodies being shipped my way.