About 3 months ago our lead web developer and designer(same person) left the company, greener pastures was the reason for leaving. Good for them I say. My problem is that his department was completely undocumented. Things have been tough since the lead left, there is a lot of knowledge both theoretical knowledge we use to quote new projects and technical/implementation knowledge of our existing products that we have lost as a result of his departure. My normal role is as a product manager (for our products themselves) and as a business analyst for some of our project based consulting work. I've taught myself to code over the past year and in an effort to continue moving forward I've taken on the task of setting my laptop up as a development machine with hopes of implementing some of the easier feature requests and fixing some of the no brainer bugs that get submitted into our ticketing system. But, no one knows how to take a fresh Windows machine and configure it to work seamlessly with our production apps.

I have requested my boss, who is still in contact with the developer who left, ask them to document and create a process to onboard a new developer, software installation, required packages, process to deploy to the productions application servers, etc. None of this exists, and I'm spinning my wheels trying to get my computer working as a functional development machine. But she does not seem to understand the need for such a process to exist. Apparently the new developer who replaced the one who left has been using a machine that was pre-configured for our environment, so even the new developer could not set up a new machine if we added another developer.

My question is two part:

1. Am I wrong in assuming a process to on-board and configure a new computer to be part of our development eco-system should exist?

2. Am I being a whinny baby and should I figure the process out and create a document on my own?