An Open Year

It’s been about a year since my last post, mostly frustrated with Chef as a beginner. Now I spend most of my day writing cookbooks and recipes. In fact I am even helping the Lead Dev at work learn Chef and got back from Chef conference. There I met a lot of amazing people and even offered to help maintain BSD support in chef.

This post isn’t about that so much. It’s mostly about a behavior I noticed I picked up. When I worked for Stephens Media I spent a lot of my energy trying to contribute, in posts, open source, pull requests, ect. Then when I moved to Slickdeals.net my time was really sucked up. I drifted from working on Pelican and stopped doing as many pull requests. At some time I set up a personally hosted Stash instance. Then I locked that stash instance off behind a login. Then I started writing in my private confluence instead of here. Now all my projects these days are All Rights I noticed… hmph.

I don’t know exactly what triggered this sharephobia but it needs to stop. I almost think it’s some weird greed involving my personal time and effort but if I was greedy wouldn’t I want people fixing up my code for me? Is there some revolutionary private research in all this that makes me more valuable? I think showing off my abilities and progress makes me more valuable.

I’m just currently working on pulling all my code out of my stash and putting it onto github, with a much better BSD license. I’m remembering what the subtitle of my blog really means.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying Ruby since I finished my DBA course. There is still a lot of areas where Chef could use improvements and I plan to do a lot about it. We are going to make BSD a first class citizen with Chef and hopefully many of it’s tools and cookbooks too.¹

Remember when I used to post monthly? Hahahaha. I don’t want to use this as a journal, I already have one of those but I wanted to give a bigger picture life update since I am updating pages and testing my jenkins build trigger with github ;p