Martin Smith, a DevOps Engineer at Rackspace, reflects on his experiences at Elastic{ON} 16, a conference focused on Elastic's product developments and open-source contributions, held in San Francisco. During his talk, Smith shared insights into the challenges of building Chef automation for Elasticsearch and invited new contributors to join the effort, highlighting updates to the Chef cookbook and the importance of collaboration in open-source projects. Smith appreciated the distributed nature of Elastic and enjoyed connecting with global peers and Elastic staff, gaining valuable knowledge about Beats architecture and Kibana changes. His travels as a digital nomad, participating in Remote Year, and his commitment to open source and community mentoring are underscored as key aspects of his professional and personal life.