Great post and most of these steps are really helpful.<p>The only thing I'm not too sure about is step 11, discouraging of IDEs. I do agree with your point that one should not depend on a IDE. However, IDEs can give you autocompletion, easy refactoring, finding references etcetera. Personally, I find some of these features invaluable.
Regarding Step 6: Can you spin up ad-hoc development and staging environments with one command?<p>Haaaaaave you met <a href="http://vagrantup.com/" rel="nofollow">http://vagrantup.com/</a> ?