Last October Ancestry.com acquired a very exciting property called Find A Grave which focused on collecting content around the graves of family, loved ones and famous people. With the acquisition we wanted to take Find A Grave to the next level and provide the current users new and better experiences around consuming and contributing content. 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
Interested in genealogy? Curious about DNA? Fascinated by the world of big data? If so, come check out my talk at the Global Big Data Conference on DNA day this Friday, April 25 at 4pmPT in the Santa Clara Convention Center! I’ll cover Jermline, our massively-scalable DNA matching application. I’ll talk about our business, give a run-through Read More
Ancestry.com to Host HBase Meetup on March 12th at our SF office If you are thinking about starting a Big Data Initiative, you may want to consider its affect across the organization. At Ancestry.com, we have been a very traditional Microsoft .NET and SQL Server shop for a long time. Several Initiatives, two which involve Read More
I changed teams at the beginning of the year from search services to an R&D team working on some exciting projects. The team has created a distributed system to repeatedly process and analyze many billions of family history records using a complex and time consuming algorithm that has been challenging to scale up and out. Read More
With the growing number of web browsers and mobile devices being used to access content on the internet, it has become increasingly important for organizations to solidify a browser/device support policy. Internally, this type of policy can help with the development and testing of new features and pages by focusing time, effort, and resources on Read More
So, you want to share your super awesome system with the world. You have it all figured out. You implemented it as a web service, and you have exposed the necessary APIs as HTTP endpoints. Your hope is that people will start to leverage those endpoints and begin to build awe-inspiring apps that will further Read More
Ancestry.com is a technology company that knows family history – not just a family history company, and not even a family history company that just happens to use technology. Technology, and particularly computing, is essential to our mission to help everyone discover, preserve and share family history. Without it, we could still tell family stories Read More
Ancestry.com has been operating a massive data service and website for over 17 years. As you might imagine, the needs of the business 17 years ago were much different from what they are now. Currently supporting over two million subscribers and providing access to more than 12 billion records in over 30,000 historical collections, Ancestry.com Read More
When designing web service APIs, a decision has to be made to protect the usage of such APIs. If you are working within a protected firewall, and you trust every single user or machine on the network, this article does not apply to you – you are in API heaven. For the rest of us, Read More