Semantic buttons and links are important for usability as well as accessibility. Hyperlinks indicate a URL change, whereas buttons are used to perform an action. I thought this post up in response to a question asked on Stack Overflow over 5 years ago. Which one should you use? <a href=”#” onclick=”doSomething()”>Do Something</a> <a href=”javascript:void(0);” onclick=”doSomething()”>Do Read More
How do you ensure accessibility on a website that is worked on by several hundred web developers? That is the question we are continually asking ourselves and have made great steps towards answering. The approach we took was to document our core guidelines and deliver presentations and trainings to all involved. This included our small Read More
Utah Code Camp 2014 came and went this weekend. More than 850 people attended and with more than 70 sessions, it was the largest code camp in Utah history. Thanks to Pat, Craig, Nate, and Kerry of Utah Geek Events for putting it all on. Ancestry.com participated in a pretty big way. In addition to the Read More
Jeremy Pollack, a lead engineer at Ancestry.com, answers questions on the technical backend of AncestryDNA in a video interview with InfoQ. The interview took place after his presentation with Bill Yetman on scaling AncestryDNA using Hadoop and HBase at QConSF in 2013. Check it out!
Recently, I volunteered to prototype a new global navigation bar for the core Ancestry.com website. This was a huge opportunity for some drastically needed improvements, not only for the code behind the header, but more importantly, the accessibility of the navigational items. Even though we’re early on in this process of creating an accessible navigation Read More
My team has been tasked with providing a dashboard for some of our product teams that enables them to aggregate various monitoring systems, logs, metrics, and other forensic tools into one place. While provisioning this dashboard, we discovered we needed a tool that could hit an endpoint, run code against the response, record the results, and Read More
At Ancestry.com, we have many developers whom contribute to open source projects. Today I want to talk about an open source project I have been involved in, along with one of my team members Shane Burke. As contributing to open source projects is not directly related to the day to day development work at Ancestry, Read More
I’m not a Front End Developer, but I often find myself writing, tweaking and adjusting style-sheets to make a particular element look just right, fix layout bugs and deal with cross-browser issues. Most often I will find someone else that has already done what I want to do and look at how they’ve styled a given Read More
Hiring awesome people who are also talented developers is often times easier said than done. Having grown tired of sifting through endless resumes and conducting countless mind numbing interviews with unqualified applicants, our team has uncovered the filtering power of a FED (front-end development) specific assessment test. While some like to schedule time during the Read More
Things are changing in the front end web world. Among those changes are HTML APIs. Here’s the problem. You’ve made a webby-UI widget that is really cool. It’s so cool, that other people want to re-use it. How do you expose your widget so that other people can use it? In the old world, you Read More