After a fairly last-minute decision to attend, I am currently in Austin for ChefConf 2017. As you might have guessed by now, I am mostly here for the Habitat content. I’m also here to meet more of the Chef community and learn more about the full suite of Chef tools.

The Great Package Update

Preparations for ChefConf were failty uneventful. I am going to be talking in the Habitat Zone^™ about my work on packaging Drupal. Just in case, I also wanted to prepare a talk on my work on packaging CrateDB.

Then Habitat 0.24 was released…

In Habitat 0.24 hab service became hab svc and this borked the endocode/drupal and baggerspion/drupal plans. In the unikely even that you have been working with these packages, I’m sorry for the diruption. New builds are now available for both. I suspect hab service load... is supposed to still work and the need to update my packages has exposed a bug.

My first flight left Berlin pretty early and so no work was happening on that leg of the journey. After I arrived to EWR I was able to do some hab pkg instal1 grab all my dependencies and fix the packages. The new builds are now available on the public depot.

Arrival: Austin

I was fairly exhausted by the time I reached Austin.

In my tiredness I was really struggling to find the taxi rank at the airport (public health warning: no Uber in Austin, yo). I searched outside the terminal for anyone semi-official who could point me in the right direction. The person I found was totally confused by the question. No shit: they were the taxi rank attendant and I was standing right next to the taxi rank.

After getting to my hotel and having a much-needed shower, I headed out to find food and music. Nice thing about downtown Austin: there is absolutely no problem finding either.

What’s Ahead?

So this is my first ChefConf. I even have a “My 1st ChefConf” sticker to prove it! On Tuesday (the first day of the main conference) I will be giving a talk in the Habitat Zone. For the rest of the conference, I will be soaking up any/all Habitat content in the programme.

Talks I will definitely be attending:

• “Getting Started with Habitat”
• “Habitat in Production”
• “Ephemeral Apps with Chef, Terraform, Nomad, and Habitat”
• “Python Applications with Habitat”
• “Kubernetes & Habitat”

On Thursday there is a day-long hackday. I will continue work on my Habitat packaging and will gladly give help to anyone starting out with the technology. Just come and poke me for help!

I will be going to Franklin’s for BBQ. At some point I am hoping to go to Elm Street Tattoo (legendary tattoo parlour, for the uninitiated) to take photos, if they will let me.

The Thanks

I always enjoy taking part in tech conferences. Especially when I am working with new technologies and want to meet the community around it.

My very existence at ChefConf has been heavily subsidised by both Chef and Endocode. I’m hugely greatful to both that I can be here.