In the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the magnetic containment field prevents contact of antimatter with normal matter in a warp core. If the field were to collapse or fall below 15% of its maximum integrity, the starship would be destroyed. This containment field was a very important safety system for starships (reference Wikia). 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
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
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
Git, a distributed revision control and source code management system has been making waves for years, and many software houses have been slowly adopting this system as not only their source code repository, but also as a way software development projects are managed. There is much debate about using either a centralized or distributed revision Read More
Starting with the adoption of Agile development practices, Ancestry.com has progressed to a continuous delivery model to enable code release whenever the business requires it. Transitioning from large, weekly or bi-weekly software rollouts to smaller, incremental updates has allowed Ancestry.com to increase responsiveness and deliver new features to customers more quickly. Ancestry.com has come a Read More
Like many organizations, Ancestry.com is constantly accumulating more high volume, high velocity data of all kinds. We apply innovation at scale to handle 10 petabytes of highly dynamic family history data, and a flood of new data derived from our autosomal DNA test, AncestryDNA. How do we do it? Join our dynamic duo Bill Yetman Read More
I recently had the opportunity to present the story of the Ancestry.com DNA pipeline project at the Utah Big Mountain Conference put on by Utah Geek Events. It really is a great story:
A typical web application starts with a blank page. Then in further sprints, you can add features to it. (I sound like one of your Agile coaches, don’t I?) But in reality, the business needs you to deliver more value than a blank page. So, how can you quantify the minimum value you are delivering Read More
Over the past few years, Ancestry.com has been moving toward agile development methods. In fact, that’s the main reason I joined the company three years ago. Since starting at the company, I have worked at moving Ancestry.com into agile methods, including teaching Scrum. Over the years, agile has taken root in the company and the Read More