Ancestry recently announced the creation of a Tech and Product User Group in Utah with the goal of encouraging collaboration between companies across the Wasatch Front to solve difficult and interesting technology and science problems. This group is intended for technologist, scientist, and product professionals who want to learn, network and grow together. Topics will Read More
At Ancestry we quickly analyze billions of rows of data to deliver insights from our massive database to internal and external audiences. To do this we need tools that have the right capabilities and can be easily adopted by our tech team. In a recent Q&A video Bill Yetman, VP of Commerce, Data and Analytics Read More
One of the biggest shifts for me when I moved from a software engineer role into management was how to think like a manager. Things I never considered as an engineer were suddenly a top priority for me. For those experiencing a similar transition, I have identified two important considerations to help shape your mindset 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
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
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
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