Technical Management at the Right Level
As is often the case with technical managers, I started out as a software engineer, and miss the experience of day-to-day coding. I became a team lead and then “officially” moved into the ranks of...
View ArticleDevOps: Finding the right place for a new idea
For the last year and a half, we’ve been breaking in a new concept at Ancestry.com called a DevOps engineer. There is a ton of material on the internet about what DevOps means to various groups, and...
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How Ancestry.com Practices Agile to Solve Challenges with Consumer DNA Testing
A typical web application starts with a blank page. Then in further sprints, you can add features to it. (I sound like one of your Agile coaches, don’t I?) But in reality, the business needs you to...
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Untangling Authentication and Authorization
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,...
View ArticleExposing APIs to Your Clients
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...
View ArticleFeatured Article: Migration to Continuous Delivery at Ancestry.com
Starting with the adoption of Agile development practices, Ancestry.com has progressed to a continuous delivery model to enable code release whenever the business requires it. Transitioning from large,...
View ArticleOn Track to Data-Driven
Ancestry.com becomes more and more aware of the value of the data our website generates every single day. We have a lot of customers coming to the website to discover, preserve and share their family...
View ArticleMigrating From TFS to Git-based Repositories (Part I)
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...
View ArticleDealing with Your Team’s Bell Curve
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...
View ArticleControlling Costs in a Cloudy Environment
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...
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Migrating From TFS to Git-based Repositories (II)
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...
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Big Data for Developers at Ancestry
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...
View ArticleLesson Learned: Sharing Code With Git Submodule
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...
View Article2015 Hack Days at Ancestry
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...
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Cathy Petti joins Ancestry leadership to spearhead developments in tech and...
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...
View ArticleThinking like a manager
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...
View ArticleVisualizing Data with Tableau
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...
View ArticleDealing with Your Team’s Bell Curve
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...
View ArticleControlling Costs in a Cloudy Environment
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Migrating From TFS to Git-based Repositories (II)
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...
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