When it comes to API interface design, do your software engineers have a design touch or feel? Many engineers do not. Without training and proper aesthetic feel, your APIs might end up quite awkward or even a bit messy. Good API design is something that most engineers are not born with but with proper training, Read More
Over the past few years Ancestry.com, has undergone a significant transformation within many aspects of its business. Steady growth combined with Agile adoption, continuous delivery, and improvements in technology and infrastructure, has created an organization focused on delivering value. In November, Ancestry.com CEO, Tim Sullivan presented at DevOps conference, FlowCon about the organizations shift to Read More
Jeremy Pollack, an engineer on the DNA Pipeline Team, and I presented together at QCon San Francisco this week. It was a real tag team effort from two different points-of-view – the “Manager” and the “Developer” view of the same project. Having both of us on stage was a first, but it seemed to work really 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
At Ancestry.com we face all sorts of exciting technology challenges to grow our business and support the company’s mission of helping everyone discover, preserve, and share their family history. This week, I’m excited to share some of the learnings we’ve had along the way in leveraging our data to help users make more meaningful discoveries Read More
Designing easy-to-use APIs is not always an easy thing to do. In fact, some developers feel guilty taking time from coding for design – especially spending design time on such things as method names, request and response objects or service names. If you don’t take the time upfront then you are destined to deal with Read More
Recently, Ancestry.com Vice President of Genomics and Bioinformatics, Cathy Ball, participated in a panel discussion at WITI’s Women Powering Technology Summit where executives from leading tech companies shared thoughts on the future of where technology is going. The session was moderated by Liz Gannes of AllThingsD and included executives from Qualcomm, CA Technologies, EMC, and 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
A couple of months ago I presented at the Big Data Innovation Summit in San Francisco along with Scott Sorensen, CTO at Ancestry.com . There we got a chance to talk about some of the ways Ancestry.com is handling big data. In the Data Science team we spend a lot of time working with raw data. Read More
Every week, AncestryDNA analyzes thousands of peoples’ DNA, decoding their family origins and finding their long-lost relatives. To that end, we used GERMLINE, an algorithm for finding hidden family relationships within a pool of DNA. However, the reference implementation of GERMLINE didn’t scale, and we were running up against its limitations. This Thursday, I’ll be Read More