The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

Stephen O'Grady at RedMonk has launched a new Podcast called Hark. In his second episode, he and Agile programming guru Kent Beck have a thoughtful discussion around the ideas in O'Grady's book "The Software Paradox."  Even though software is "eating the world" and become more widespread and strategic, its economic value appears to be declining rapidly. Certainly, we've seen a shift in the …

A week or two ago, I got into a conversation on Twitter about technical debt, and someone shared this superb video by Ward Cunningham (youtube). Here is Ward’s Interview website.

Join 10,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

Waterfall, agile, developer or operations, devops, managers, CTOs… everyone should watch this video, for it cuts to the heart of the challenges we face doing modern software development, in a fast paced and always changing environment.

Though it’s not mentioned in the video, I would argue using an ORM is an expensive form of debt, one that …

I work for realestate.com.au and we're an agile delivery shop. We're trying to catch up to some of the best of the best web-shops like Etsy and so on through continuous delivery. Millions of deploys a day!

The big kicker with continuous delivery is around schema changes. I'm curious to know how everyone is performing MySQL (InnoDB) schema changes in a agile continuous delivery shop. So please comment and share your thoughts.

How do we do ours? First off we don't have a good story yet about schema changes though I think we're ahead of the pack

• Limit schema changes to column additions / index changes / new tables
• Perform our schema changes online using Master Master Active Standby replication (using hardware load balancer out the front of our databases - Citrix Netscaler)
• Statement based replication 
• Application fault tolerance (to a degree) - so …

I’d like to take a step back from technical issues to distill some of my thoughts on the challenges of data warehousing in the 21st century.

Having worked on a number of warehouse projects in different industries over the years, I’ve encountered many challenges, some failures, some successes. One thing is certain: all organizations that have a reasonable amount of data should be building a data warehouse if they don’t already have one. In 2009, given the economic atmosphere, no one wants to wait as long, or pay as much, as they did in 1999 to get one.

While this is a huge opportunity for open-source competitors like MySQL, it comes with big challenges for an organization that thinks it will get a $10MM warehouse (in 1999 dollars) for $300,000 (2009 dollars).

My contention is that in a web-connected, high-traffic and high-speed world, a monolithic approach with a rigid set of requirements, and a project team isolated …