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Comment by jnsaff2 | Hacker News Reader

One of the cute names horrowshow for me is Chef. Everything is based on some supposedly cooking analogue that just does not fit with (at least my) mental model of IaC.

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Absolutely this! In case anyone isn't aware of the insane thematic naming in Chef:

Chef = a configuration management tool

Recipe = an individual Ruby script that makes sure something is installed and configured correctly (e.g. a mysql recipe)

Cookbook = a bundle of recipe(s) and basic metadata (what do these recipes do, who wrote them, etc.)

Supermarket = a community site with common cookbooks, what others would call a "hub", "central repository", "marketplace" or "store"

knife = a command line tool for managing your chef installation

Test Kitchen = a test suite runner

Cookstyle = a code linter

However, now that Chef has gone full Enterprise (never go full Enterprise), the names are now all enterprisey-sounding: everything is "Chef XYZ", e.g. "Buzzword you know + Buzzword you don't", harnesses the CxO's FOMO. Chef Habitat = write declarative rules for applying cookbooks to machines. Chef InSpec = auditing/compliance. Chef Workstation = what you would have normally installed anyway, the development kit and runtime tools, but now it's EnTeRpRiSe, ...

Puppet went full enterprise too and now there's a dizzying amount of "products" catering to your needs.

It's written on the wall for Ansible, Red Hat/IBM is busy churning out the product space already.

It's weird that there's so much money in enterprise IT. If anything, they should know the value of standards and reference implementations.

Almost 25 years ago, SSH went full enterprise and promptly died. Somehow the need for a simple remote shell protocol didn't, though, and now OpenSSH is instead perhaps the most valuable tool we have.

I had no idea there was ever a company called SSH but apparently they still exist . Seems they were way ahead of the curve on what became known as "open core"

Homebrew is another project that overdoes it IMO

This is because cook books while useful, aren’t entertaining stories. Now if they named it after a good character from a story everyone knows, say the hunter from the big bad wolf, and it’s purpose was to chop up evil wolves taking advantage of grandmas and little girls with baked goods, then everyone knows that character, and as long as the purpose of the service is to defeat impostors trying to do harm then it is fitting.

And if the junior doesn’t know the story of little red riding hood, well then it is your lucky day and you are one of the 1 in 10000 who gets to tell them the story.

;) https://xkcd.com/1053/

How strange! Why wouldn't he just tell her to google it, and go back to looking at his phone?

My default is to name the project something related to Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Then when things go off the rails, I can say 'Shaka, when the walls fell'

Names of my mail systems :)

And when the other person in the conversation looks perplexed or lost, just repeat it again, slowly, and add emotion to some of the syllables. They'll get it eventually.

> Now if they named it after a good character from a story everyone knows

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

I worked at a place where people would write their own wrappers for Chef things, name them, and then refer to them by that name. "Dave, nobody has any idea what 'spork' is."

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