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
Ancestry recently announced the launch of AncestryHealth in beta and the appointment of Cathy Petti as the new Chief Health Officer (CHO) of AncestryHealth. She joins our strong and growing leadership team with the initiative to guide our robust genomics, bioinformatics, privacy and security teams in a health-focused strategy and empower consumers to take charge of their 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
When someone takes an AncestryDNA test, we compare their DNA to the DNA of the hundreds of thousands of other test-takers in the AncestryDNA database. We’re looking for “DNA matches” — people who share DNA with one another, and so might be relatives. The main idea behind identifying a DNA match is to look for Read More
Flag Day in the USA is just a couple of weeks away. Flags are used to represent different things (usually nations or states). While the things a nation’s flag stands for are more important than what flags in code represent, it’s easier to discuss how to use flags in code, so that’s what I’ll do 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
This post was co-written with Peter Carbonetto, Ph.D., Computational Biologist at AncestryDNA For every AncestryDNA customer, we estimate the ethnic origins of their ancestors from their DNA sample—what we call a “genetic ethnicity estimate.” AncestryDNA customers can currently trace their ancestral origins to specific parts of the world, including 26 regions across Europe, Africa, Asia, Read More
At AncestryDNA, we empower our customers to uncover exciting details about their family stories. Today, we announced a new AncestryDNA experience based on years of research and development by the AncestryDNA science team that is revolutionizing the way people discover, preserve, and share their family history. Learn more about the announcement here. We are combining DNA Read More
Last year we began an effort internally at Ancestry to determine if we could scale out Node.js within the frontend applications teams. Node.js is a platform that we felt could solve a lot of our needs as a business to build modern, scalable, distributed applications using one of our favorite languages: JavaScript. I want to Read More
You are probably aware of Git Submodules. If you haven’t, you may want to read about it from Atlassian and Git itself. In summary, Git provides a way to embed a reference to a separate project within a main project, while treating both projects as separate entities (versioning, commits etc). This article applies to any Read More