Everything began 4 years ago, CFEngine 3 had just been released, documentation and expertise were in short supply. We had to accept the reality of a steep learning curve. As CFEngine grew so did we. We discovered bugs, submitted pull requests, designed workarounds for various pitfalls, gained advances in productivity (thanks to the knowledge and experience gained working with CFEngine 3) and evaluated design choices available to us. This journey led us to become one of the most advanced CFEngine users in Europe. I'll recount our journey, share insights on solution architecture with CFEngine and show examples of what we had to overcome and how we achieved that using less well-known features of CFEngine. Our examples will cover advanced use of CFEngine 3 code. Finally, I will present our retrospective: what we did right, what we did wrong and share where we have got to thus far in our journey.