Who?

Github: Seth Vargo (he/him)

Project: Chef & related projects

Date: 08/29/2014

Why?

Seth announced in a post on their blog that he was leaving his job at Chef, the open source Chef community, and taking a software engineering sabbatical. In the prior months leading up to this post, Seth mentioned that he was recieving a lot of negativity for his work in the community.

I want to emphasize that the tooling I create and projects for which I am a contributor were never a part of my full-time job at Chef. I gave back to the community for the “love of the game”; I identified problems, and I did my best to improve the Chef experience. As a human, I recognize there are problems I cannot solve and questions I cannot answer. Recently my projects and projects I participate in have been the victims of vicious attacks and other select unpleasantries. Not only have I (not my code) been called offensive and derogatory names, but I have also received numerous abusive emails and two death threats in the past three months.

He then went on to announce that he would no longer be in attending in person Chef related events. Also, he brought up that he was looking for people to either take over maintaining some of his personal projects, or to help maintain (and share the “burden of uncivil behavior”) the projects.

To that end, and for my own personal safety and well being, I will not be in attendance at the Chef Community Summit. Furthermore, I no longer plan to shoulder the burden of uncivil behavior alone. If you are interested in maintaining (or helping to maintain) any of my personal open source projects, please get in touch when I return from my sabbatical.