At the Astrient Foundation we are committed to disseminating technical expertise. Over the coming weeks we will build a full web application, detailing the technical choices and process in this blog. We will begin with setting up a development environment and continue through application deployment. As we are developing, you may notice that we use very few third party frameworks for persistence. We believe it is essential for every developer to have some understanding of SQL, the challenge of balancing efficient database structure against business logic needs and logical yet efficient object models, and how to perform minor DBA tasks. We will also cover the basics of creating a Linux production deployment environment. Look forward to our first post next week.