None of the below is possible without heavily leaning on work already done by the amazing Matt Ray (Twitter). He’s done a ton of work around 32-bit ARM builds for Chef and Cinc, and this work is only possible with his lead work. I’ve recently been tasked with collaborating on a project that involves the deployment of Cumulus Linux to various datacenters, and to facilitate the automation of datacenter setup and deployment.

I’ve been using Chef’s Habitat(tm) and the community distribution “Biome” for a while now. I love the systems, and the community. However, the tools surrounding its usage have not been developed much in the way of graphical systems to aid administration. Thats all changing! I’ve worked for a couple of months on a prototype/alpha administrative viewer for the Habitat/Biome.  The census viewer comes in 2 parts:

I’ve been doing fairly regular and extensive contributions to the Habitat core-plans repository over the last couple of years. Primarily keeping packages up to date, but also contributing new ones, and helping shape the structure and format of our approach to testing all packages, to ensure quality. One of the challenges with diverse management of open source software is keeping up to date with changes as they happen. There are a number of projects and sites around that track open source software and can provide notifications, but none offered up-to-the-second source based version information.

Wow! This year during ChefConf 2019 I was awarded as an “Awesome Community Chef” by the Chef community! For the past 2 years or so, I’ve been putting in a lot of personal time and effort to contribute back to the Habitat project, by way of the central core-plans repository. From here, I’m able to help maintain, update, fix and strengthen software that is used by countless developers and operators around the world.