When I first started working with Chef, there were a couple of areas that I knew were going to be really awesome and helpful but I wasn't sure how to get started with them. In this presentation, I'll provide a quick introduction to five things you've always wanted to know about Chef but were afraid to ask. I gave this presentation at #ChefConf 2012. Level-up your Chef skills by learning about these areas of Chef:

You've heard of Chef, Puppet, and other frameworks that can help you build out your infrastructure. You've been meaning to play around with one or more of them for some time now. Now's your chance; Start cooking up on your own servers! In this presentation, I provide an introduction to Chef with a focus on what you'll need to know to get a Rails application up and running. Topics include: Introduction to Chef Nodes, roles, environments, and other terminology Introduction...

At RailsConf 2012, I gave a presentation on how our web operations team enables developer productivity. There's always a bit of tension when getting features from idea to production. In this talk, I describe some of the changes CustomInk has made to reduce this friction and keep the new features coming. Gone are the days of bi-monthly deploys, office pools dedicated to guessing when this deploy will be rolled back, and the ceremony surrounding the deploy-rollback-fix-deploy cycle. Today, ideas flow...

Last week the CustomInk Tech team welcomed two new interns, Nolan Carroll and Seth Vargo. Nolan and Seth are joining us for the summer from Carnegie Mellon University where they are both majoring in Information Systems. Nolan and Seth wasted no time hopping on our deploy train last week, but they couldn't have done it without the help of our (semi) automated build process. A while ago, Nathen Harvey talked about our Green Screen build monitor. While this serves as...

One Saturday dedicated to honing your craft It's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of projects and deadlines and forget that software development is very much a craft that needs to be practiced. The complex requirements and external pressures of a production application often cloud our judgement, forcing us to forgo the fundamental concepts that create great software. It's useful to step away from the code you work on day-to-day to focus on honing your skills merely for...

The CustomInk technology team wants to extend a warm welcome to our newest member, Josh Born. Josh wasted no time and hopped onto the deploy train today for his first production release. At CustomInk we like to continuously deploy changes to our site. This means no sprints, no iterations, no milestones. We work, and when we are satisfied with our work, we deploy it. On average, engineers deploy updates to our site about five to seven times a day.

One of the most common production issues I run into are missing indexes. The other day I got to thinking that they are usually missing because of the evolution of the software. We might use some rails generators to prototype some basic functionality. Then we'll iterate over a set of stories incorporating new behavior. Maybe we'll do some refactoring, scrap some features, pull out some dead code and "harden" some areas we've identified as brittle. But we almost never analyze...