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
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
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
Here at Ancestry.com, we currently use Microsoft’s High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster to do a variety of things. My team has multiple things we use an HPC cluster for. Interestingly enough, we don’t communicate with HPC exactly the same for any distinct job type. We’re using the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model for two of Read More
Shakespeare might not approve of my taking liberties with his play Hamlet, though prince Hamlet was essentially saying the same thing as I was feeling last year: To be, or not to be, that is the question— Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Read More
Big Data has been all the craze. Business, marketing and project managers like it because they can plot out trends to make decisions. To us developers, Big Data is just a bunch of logs. In this blog post, I would like to point out that Big Data (or logs with context) can be leveraged by Read More
Ancestry was selected as a 2014 NewCo.SF host company. Come join us at our San Francisco office on Thursday, Sept. 11 at 4:30pm PT to hear from Eric Shoup, EVP of Product at Ancestry.com. He will provide an inside look at the unique and meaningful business of family history and the tech, science, and product Read More
Data analytics and visualization is everywhere we turn. We find it in websites, newspaper articles, smartphone apps, and more. With so many options for data tools it can seem overwhelming at times to know what will work and what won’t for your data goals. At Ancestry.com we constantly evolve to find or create the tools Read More
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
