I worked for a company in the past―a distributed company. We had a policy that all developers should be able to recreate their development environment within an hour of putting a bullet through their current one. Good policy. Kept everything distributed, and lightweight :)

@jonathansampson after the first two times i had to remember to install our various internal certs into a jvm, python's certifi and node before i could build stuff again i started writing scripts to restore my dev setup in a hurry. turns out they're kinda handy for other devs on my team too, but the unexpectedly cool bit was new hires are up and running waaaaay quicker

@incognitjoe @jonathansampson Yeah I did the same with Ansible. Big wins: new hires can be ready quickly and it's a stepping stone for using Ansible to provision production. Downsides so far: trying to get everyone into the Ansible-first mindset, rather than "do it manually, automate maybe later".