I've often thought that it would be nice to have a script that rebuilt the software installation on a developer's workstation from scratch, completely automatically, using only configuration files and scripts checked into version control somewhere. Such a process could run every night while the developer sleeps. This would ensure that it's dead easy to bring a new developer fully up to speed on a team.
I know a couple guys who do that. Their Steam app is also managed by Chef.
We got our dev setup partially automated like that. Even the partial setup was better than what I heard -- took a week to set up a laptop with the tools and the whole platform. When I was onboarded, it took about day, more or less hands off.
