Yesterday was my last day at Chef Software. It is the second-longest I have been at any company — nearly six years. I have been very fortunate to have held four very distinct positions at Chef over my time there: professional services consultant, engineering manager, product manager, and finally, product marketing manager. When I contrast my experience working for a startup with the time I spent in the enterprise, I would, without question, state that this has been a better experience for me both personally and professionally. I could not go back to work for a huge company where the sense of urgency and determination to succeed are just not there, and where the needless bureaucracy snuffs out the flames of innovation before they have a chance to catch. I’m sure there are exceptions out there, but when I think about the poor customer experiences we all have interacting with our bank, college, grocery store, or health care providers, those are fundamentally a direct result of company-wide complacency driven by sheer size and corresponding market dominance.

It is also the first time for me leaving a company because I outgrew it — or maybe it outgrew me. In tech, we love to dump on the 99.99% of companies that aren’t Hacker News Hot Shit ™ while neglecting that many of them are doing quite well financially, thank you very much, and solving real customer problems. While the HN crowd is busy chasing shiny objects, the rest of us are off building businesses, and extremely successful ones at that. For me, though, there wasn’t much more I could do or wanted to do at Chef. The company is at a phase of its growth that is about immensely scaling the products it already has and deriving revenue from them, rather than launching entirely new product lines. As a product guy and engineer at heart, it’s therefore time for me to move along.

I wish my colleagues at Chef a great deal of success in the next phase of the company’s growth. It has been a privilege and an honor to have worked alongside so many of you and to have learned so much.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the XOXO Festival right here in Portland. For those who don’t know about XOXO (as I didn’t before I moved here last year) it’s a festival and conference for and by makers of things on the Internet: game designers/developers, programmers, filmmakers, comedians, artists, podcasters, and the like. A single-track daytime conference accompanies the evening festivities, packed with thought-provoking keynotes delivered by very accomplished people such as Jonny Sun, Ijeoma Oluo and Demi Adejuyigbe. It’s primarily this part of the event that I want to say a few words about. Continue reading →

Over the last couple of weeks, many open-source luminaries have written about open-source business models in response to Redis Labs’ modification of their license terms for some Redis Modules. Most of these blog posts dissect one thing: how does one create a business around open source? I actually think that this question, framed as it is, is kind of absurd. It sounds to me a lot like “how do we make money off the horses which have already fled the barn through the doors we left open?” Starting a company off on the wrong foot by giving away all of your valuable IP – and then figuring out how to build commercial products on top of whatever scraps of value remain – is silly. Many such conversations – led by technologists — start first with open-source zealotry and reverse into a business model which is the wrong way to do things. Instead, if you’re considering building a company based around an open-source foundation, first design the business model, and then contemplate how open sourcing certain pieces can serve as an accelerant to that business. If you can’t find an accelerant, maybe your business shouldn’t be based on your IP being open source. Continue reading →

Back in June, Chef launched Habitat, the product that I’ve been working full-time on since fall 2015. Habitat is a system for building and running applications in a way that makes them portable across a wide range of infrastructure platforms, anything from bare metal and virtual machines all the way up to PaaS and containers. Along the way, you get clustering, secrets management, service discovery, runtime configuration injection, and a whole host of other features for free. You can learn more about Habitat at habitat.sh.

Today, I’d like to spend a moment and talk about Habitat’s user experience design, and specifically, how we put a great deal of thought into making the command-line UX awesome. Continue reading →

South Beach. CC-BY-NC, by Thomas Hawk – https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk

A couple of weeks ago, Mathias Meyer wrote an article entitled “From Open (Unlimited) to Minimum Vacation Policy“, detailing how his company, Travis CI, has moved from away from an “unlimited” vacation policy. Mathias found that the dangers of unlimited vacation policies were coming true: Engineers weren’t taking any or enough vacation to avoid burning out. So, he decided to move Travis to a model where a minimum amount of vacation is required. Sounds great, but doesn’t it seem like we’re right back where we started? Isn’t this just a traditional vacation policy couched in different terms? And what was so bad about traditional vacation policies, anyway? Continue reading →