Mitigating human errors is certainly important. The brittle nature of your onboarding story is exactly why I wrote this post and encourage the practice in it.

Mitigating human errors is certainly important. The brittle nature of your onboarding story is exactly why I wrote this post and encourage the practice in it. Larger apps that I deploy have a development.py.example file that people can copy to development.py (or fredsmith.py, madonna.py, it doesn't matter. These would not be checked-in to Git) Then all I need to do before running anything in my project is prefix with ENV=fredsmith. As a team we could settle on a different name for this variable. We could all have our own environments. We could even decide, as a team, to check them into Git so that we can all see each others config in case there is an issue.