I first joined Ancestry as a software engineer in 2006. I left to join a startup that showed a lot of promise, but like many of my colleagues at Ancestry who pursue work elsewhere, I came back in 2008. At the risk of sounding overly promotional, I’d like to highlight a few of the many Read More
Last week, Ancestry interns from the Provo office gathered to participate in this summer’s Ancestry Intern Day. This day of food, networking, presentations and zip lining celebrated the program and our talented interns. During the intern day, a sampling of interns from different teams presented their favorite projects to Ancestry leadership and their peers. Ancestry Read More
After attending computer camp at the age of twelve, Crista Cowan’s father gave her a special task—computerize decades of family history information. She spent years of Sunday afternoons preserving her family history. This task became a hobby, then an obsession. It lead her to private client jobs and then a career as a Corporate Genealogist Read More
Several years ago, we introduced FedEx Day at Ancestry: a 24-hour hackathon to build something fun & innovative, work with people other than your everyday team, and learn new technologies and skills. Participation is voluntary and we noticed that the number of people participating was starting to decline. We gathered feedback from the teams and made Read More
Yes, we made monsters out of clay. If you happened to be in Midway, Utah at the very end of September you might have bumped into the Ancestry product team holding our annual product summit. About 80 of us gathered for an action packed two-day event filled with team building, strategic conversations, and a few Read More
Previously, I wrote about why Git-based repositories have become popular and why TFS users ought to migrate to Git. In this article, I would like to take a stab at providing a quick guide for longtime TFS / Visual Studio users to quickly ramp up on the knowledge required to work on Git-based repositories. This Read More
A career journey is a curvy path that usually takes unexpected turns, and as a designer in the growing field of UX, it’s sometimes a struggle to find the right environment to foster great design discussions with fellow UXers. One of the things I’ve enjoyed most at Ancestry.com is the great team who have helped Read More
What is Ignite? Ignite is a format for giving a talk on any subject. A speaker uses twenty slides, which auto-advance every 15 seconds, to provide a five minute talk. The purpose of this article is to elaborate on these talks and explain why we’re doing them and why you should try it at your Read More
When I joined Ancestry.com, we were a small start-up of a few hundred employees in some cramped offices behind the post office in Orem, Utah. Now almost 15 years later, we’re an international organization of more than 1,400 employees with offices around the world. Yet despite our growth, Ancestry.com has continued to provide employees with Read More
I changed teams at the beginning of the year from search services to an R&D team working on some exciting projects. The team has created a distributed system to repeatedly process and analyze many billions of family history records using a complex and time consuming algorithm that has been challenging to scale up and out. Read More