I don't think the time spent learning Chef (or Puppet) is ever wasted. Exactly! It might not look like it right now, but skills in using these tools are movin

I don't think the time spent learning Chef (or Puppet) is ever wasted. Exactly! It might not look like it right now, but skills in using these tools are moving from cutting edge to essential job/contracting skills in the near future. I don't know much about the Puppet community, but I do know that within the Chef community, the learning curve is flattening. The big thing of 2012 was that we're very close to getting these VM+Chef+Berkshelf setup in a way where you can get onboarded on an existing open-source application without knowing you are using Chef under the cover. How deep you want to dive in is up to you from that point.