Standardized development environments (SDEs) aim to bridge gaps between local developer setups and production environments, reducing inconsistencies that lead to issues like "works on my machine" excuses. By providing identical infrastructure from development through production, SDEs boost productivity, code quality, and velocity. Automation and standardization are key enablers of environment unification, including provisioning automation, policy frameworks, development standards, templatized resources, and self-service platforms. SDEs solve problems like context switching, hidden defects, customer experience degradation, and delayed issue resolution by providing unified configurations, simultaneous rollout, rapid reproducibility, and improved debugging. While adopting SDEs has its challenges, the benefits include faster innovation, higher-quality apps, happier developers, and a reduced "works on my machine" excuse, making it worthwhile for high-performance software organizations to prioritize environment standardization.