Announcing Progress Chef Champions for 2025

Progress Chef is proud to launch its participation in the Progress Champions Program, a program that highlights expert DevOps practitioners, developers, educators and influencers who are active in the Chef ecosystem and DevOps community.

Across our products, the Progress Champions include the very best of our practitioner community. Their commitment to excellence, engagement and collaboration moves us forward and we’re proud to be with them on their journey. Heading into 2025, with our entry into the program, we’ll be here to recognize their skills and contributions, and to help showcase and reward their expertise and community leadership.

Do you know someone who would be a great fit to be a Progress Champion? We’re all ears. Nominations are open and evaluations will take place in December 2024. We want to see your names!

What Makes a Champion?

Like with most honor programs, we recognize all that Progress Champions do, but we also have a few expectations. This is an annual recognition program. As future prospects look to become Progress Champions, we want to be transparent as to what is expected—or what qualifications and activities we seek—in order to be awarded both this year and in the future. Most who are recognized as Champions will easily go above and beyond.

  • Champions are expected to be professional, have an independent voice and be inclusive.
  • Champions share expertise through active participation and provide feedback.
  • Champions are expected to share knowledge about Progress products enthusiastically.
  • Champions are expected to influence online and offline.
  • Five wins sought in any combination through the calendar year:
    • Speak at a User Group/Meetup/Conference and demo/talk about Chef products. 
    • Write an article and showcase Chef to illustrate business solutions and/or technical skills. 
    • Participate regularly as a member of the Chef Community Advisory Council. 
    • Maintain an active and visible presence in the Chef Community Slack workspace. 
    • Talk about Chef and other Progress products on podcasts/talk shows. 
    • Use Progress products in your own live stream or join our DevRel or technical product marketing team on live streams. 
    • Answer five or more community questions about Chef products on any developer forums (e.g., Discourse, StackOverflow). 
    • Demonstrate advocacy for Chef and other Progress products internally at your own organization or with your clients. 
    • Anything else innovative that you believe shows commitment to the Progress Chef ecosystem and community. 

Rewards

Progress Champions are awesome, deserving of our unending love and adoration—and a few tangible benefits. We celebrate our Progress Champions with a range of exclusive perks and value our continued collaboration.

  1. Digital Progress Champions badge for web/signature use
  2. Corresponding physical die-cut stickers
  3. Custom-designed gift with corresponding badge
  4. Perpetual Trophy | Plaques each year
  5. Access to PMs/Engineering through Slack channel
  6. Early insight into Progress product strategy and roadmaps
  7. Opportunities for Beta product testing and feedback
  8. Invitation to our annual Progress Champions Appreciation Summit
  9. Invitation to submit to speak at Progress events
  10. Social media promotion and featured profile on Progress Champions website
  11. Community Twitch streams showcasing Progress Champions

Come Join!

The Progress Champions program showcases excellence in the developer community and the passion to educate others to be more successful. If you work with Progress technologies, we appreciate the partnership.

If you or someone you know would make a great Champion,  nominations are open year-round!

Want to know more about the program? Drop us a line at champions@progress.com.

For more details, check out the Sitefinity Blog and Telerik Blog citing their 2024 winners!

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Jeff Strauss

Jeff Strauss is the head of developer relations and community for Progress Chef. Over the past two decades, he has worn many hats—software architect, consultant, attorney, community organizer—but has always done so with a passion for enabling others to be the best and most successful versions of themselves. In his role for the Chef platform and the other infrastructure-related products at Progress, he supports engineers and end users in the DevOps world to leverage powerful tools and improve their work through education, outreach, and practitioner engagement. Jeff lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his wife and two children, and enjoys playing music, watching Blues hockey and St. Louis City SC soccer, and wandering aimlessly in the woods.