A great thing about the Chef community is the wide assortment of various cookbooks to configure and manage servers. Often there is more than one cookbook available to manage the same software. How do you know whether a cookbook is any good? If youre automating something for the first time, how do you write a 'good' cookbook?
In this talk, I'll give my thoughts on cookbook style, focusing less on details ("should I use symbols or strings?") and more on general practices for what a good cookbook looks like. We'll take a quick tour through varied topics such as recipe size and structure, levels of abstraction and when they're appropriate, namespacing, unit testing (when and where), and more.
Julian's slides are available on slideshare.
Julian (@julian_dunn) is a senior consulting engineer with Chef Software, Inc. where he helps customers learn and implement Chef. He has over a decade of software development and systems administration experience at outfits large and small. When he's not helping customers with Chef, he enjoys good craft beer, indie music, and writing biographies about himself in the third person.