This Thursday most of us will be sitting around a table telling each other what we are most grateful for this Thanksgiving season. Many responses will probably be friends and family, food and the new Star Wars movie. As an engineer there is a unique set of tools, programs and people that I just can’t Read More
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
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
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
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
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
From an engineering and development standpoint, one of the most important aspects of cloud infrastructure is the concept of unlimited resources. The idea of being able to get a new server to experiment with, or being able to spin up more servers on the fly to handle a traffic spike is a foundational benefit of Read More
I recently came across this article on the INTUIT QuickBase blog and was intrigued by the premise. It asserts that inside any team or organization, you will have a bell curve of talent and intelligence – which most would agree to. It’s not a bad thing, it just happens. Regardless of how well staffed you Read More