Scaling Node.js in the Enterprise

Posted by Ancestry Team on March 31, 2015 in Development, Web

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

Stop using anchors as buttons!

Posted by Ancestry Team on September 2, 2014 in Accessibility, CSS/HTML/JavaScript, UX, Web

Semantic buttons and links are important for usability as well as accessibility. Hyperlinks indicate a URL change, whereas buttons are used to perform an action. I thought this post up in response to a question asked on Stack Overflow over 5 years ago. Which one should you use? <a href=”#” onclick=”doSomething()”>Do Something</a> <a href=”javascript:void(0);” onclick=”doSomething()”>Do Read More

Website Performance 101

Posted by Jeremy Johnson on June 17, 2014 in Performance, Web

Here at Ancestry.com, we have a team dedicated to monitoring, measuring, and helping the company improve the performance of the website. Trying to do this is a very fun and interesting challenge. With a website that has many billions of records and other content (10 petabytes), making it fast is no small task! To illustrate Read More

Find A Grave Engineering

Posted by Ancestry Team on May 21, 2014 in Development, Mobile Development, Web

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

Creating a Completely Accessible Navigation Bar in HTML, CSS, and JS

Posted by Ancestry Team on January 27, 2014 in Accessibility, CSS/HTML/JavaScript, UX, Web

Recently, I volunteered to prototype a new global navigation bar for the core Ancestry.com website. This was a huge opportunity for some drastically needed improvements, not only for the code behind the header, but more importantly, the accessibility of the navigational items. Even though we’re early on in this process of creating an accessible navigation Read More