I've introduced Chef at two companies, once at a publicly traded company running a Java stack on bare metal with Hosted Chef, and once at a pre-funding startup running Python in the cloud with Chef Solo. Both times, I drove the adoption of Chef and worked to ramp up the dev team. I've found out first-hand why some of the best-practices exist (i.e. 'execute' omnipotence guards, chef-client splay), noted a number of helpful tricks for both getting your devs to adopt Chef (i.e. use-case specific knife plugins, LWRPs to hide gory details) and for taking the initial config-management plunge (i.e. report/error handlers to IRC, failing Chef runs fast). Chef is an amazing tool, in part because of it's power and flexibility. There is, in fact, more than enough power and flexibility to shoot yourself in the foot. I want 5 minutes to share my thoughts about getting teams started with and loving with Chef (without anybody getting hurt).