In a much less serious vein, I had a boss who used to joke about throwing our laptops on the ground at work, saying "if you're not up and running on another machine in 10 minutes, you're doing it wrong"
I can do that at work, because all my code is on an EC2 instance, and I use emacs on the remote box as my editor. I've accidentally logged out of my X session and been back up and running in less than a minute before.
How often is this put to the test? How do you automatically record configuration changes like the occasional "apt-get" to bring in something you're missing?
We use chef to record all our config. Our chef configuration is pretty stable these days, but it gets tested every time we build a new dev box, which happens at least as often as we hire new engineers. I could completely rebuild my dev box at any minute and the only thing I'd lose would be unpushed changes I was working on at that minute.
