Talk Description:
When you hear "sysadmin work", do you think of ssh, vi, and shell scripts? If you do, it's probably not the most fun sounding work. Repetitive, tedious, and error-prone are words that come to mind.

Thankfully, configuring servers is all but a solved problem thanks to Chef. The days of vi, and shell scripts are mostly over. Building complex infrastructure has never been easier.

Whether you manage a multi-datacenter cluster, or the VPS that runs your blog, you have a tremendous amount to gain from configuration management. In this talk, I'll show you how it works.

Speaker Bio:
James Golick's software experience ranges from artificial intelligence to web front-end and JavaScript development. Most recently, James has fallen back in love with web development thanks to Ruby on Rails.

Since discovering Rails, James has become a prolific contributor to its open source ecosystem. He is the author ofseveral popular plug-ins and gems, and a contributor to countless others, including the framework itself.

James is an advocate for well-written, well-tested code and he blogs regularly about the practice of developing software. He speaks regularly at software development conferences and user groups. James is a partner in Protose, Inc.