HTML5/CSS guru, prolific webcaster and blogger, banjo player and all-round International Man of Mystery Chris Coyier is one of my fellow BarCamp Tour members and a friend of Shopify. He joined our friends at Wufoo, makers of web forms par excellence, who have since been acquired by SurveyMonkey.

If you get the chance to catch Chris at one of the upcoming BarCamps on the BarCamp Tour, do it! He’s a great presenter with lots of teach and an entertaining style in which to teach it. You can get a taste of a Chris Coyier presentation at CSS Tricks, where his 101st screencast, Let’s Suck at Github Together, walks you through Github with very little pain.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Creative Commons photo by Paul Hart.

Over at the Shopify Technology Blog, John Duff explains the Git workflow we use at Shopify. Whether you’re a Git user wondering about how other people use it or looking to migrate from your oldie-von-moldie version control system that’s not expected to catch up to Git for years, you’ll find John’s writeup useful.

In his latest article on Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood talks about the importance of getting your database under version control and links to K. Scott Allen’s series of articles on the topic:

1. Three rules for database work
2. The Baseline
3. Change Scripts
4. Views, Stored Procedures and the Like
5. Branching and Merging

Lucky me, I’ve got Rails migrations, which are suitable for small teams. Other development platforms will require different approaches, some of which are covered by Allen’s articles. If there’s a topic that’s screaming for a book or website, this is it!