Findmypast

DevOps at Findmypast: How Spanners implement DevOps Practices

Introduction

DevOps at Findmypast: Postgres Database Upgrades

Introduction

Data Science at FMP: Tree Structure Analysis

Introduction

Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 3

Technology and techniques from the Findmypast Tech teams

Testing Library ByRole Performance Improvements

We use Testing Library to test our React UI pages and components.

Team Diversity

Team Diversity On-line meetings have their advantages and disadvantages; I think most of us are feeling a little “zoomed out” through the Covid-19 lock downs. But, one useful feature is the ability to see all the faces of our Product and Design team, side-by-side on my screen each week for on our weekly catch-up. It led me to reflect on how fortunate we are to work with such a diverse team of colleagues and how important that is for team dynamics.

Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 2

Technology and techniques from the Findmypast Tech teams

Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 1

Technology and techniques from the Findmypast Tech teams

Data Science at FMP: Dataset Recommendation

Technology and techniques from the Findmypast Tech teams

Data Science at FMP: Network Science

Technology and techniques from the Findmypast Tech teams

Migrating a GitHub Pages hosted Jekyll blog to version 4 with the help of GitHub Actions

We use Jekyll to statically build this blog, and have integrated it with GitHub Pages, which takes care of hosting and the CI/CD pipeline. The Jekyll/GitHub Pages solution involves using the github-pages gem in the project, and configuring the GitHub Pages settings for the repository. To build and deploy, all that’s required is to push a commit to the master branch, and the GitHub hosted blog is live in a matter of minutes.

Running ASP.NET applications on Windows nodes in a Kubernetes cluster

In the latest installment of our Kubernetes series we will continue our journey with some Windows ASP.NET containerisation and deploy them onto Windows K8S worker nodes. Is it going to be viable though?

Making history: insights from inside a genealogy product team

Technology and techniques from the engineering and design teams at Findmypast

Round up of the last year

As the year draws to an end, I have found myself looking back on all that has happened during my first year at Findmypast.

Using BDD at FMP

Behaviour-Driven Development has gained some attention over the last few years with some companies embracing this methodology. Others are more sceptical and may see additional “code” as waste. Let’s take a closer look.

Learning Swarm

Technology and techniques from the engineering and design teams at Findmypast

Accessibility First

Creating pages “mobile first” is a technique that’s very familiar to front end engineers. A few extra considerations could transform this technique into “accessibility first” while still maintaining the principles of “mobile first”. Primarily, “accessibility first” is using the right semantic structure to outline your page from the outset. This will make your site understandable for everyone, using the broadest range of devices.

My onboarding experience at Findmypast

I have recently joined Findmypast as a Junior DevOps Engineer working with tools such as Kubernetes, Docker, Puppet, Ansible, Prometheus.

Findmypast Onboarding Experience

I have recently joined Findmypast in Dundee as a Senior Software Engineer and I’ve been happily developing solutions in some of my favourite tech stacks (Node, C#, Docker to name a few).

My Onboarding Experience

Background

Buy or Build?

Should you buy software or build it yourself?

Remote hiring for Software Engineers at Findmypast

This, we hope, is a friendly guide to the Findmypast engineering interview process. With Coronavirus significantly impacting everyone in the UK (and the world) we’re very fortunate at Findmypast because we’ve been able to continue working throughout the crisis. We’re used to having video meetings and working with colleagues across Scotland, England, Ireland and the United States. As an engineering and product team we’re mostly able to work from home and continue iterating on our product. We understand that interviews over a video call may not be as natural as a face-to-face interview, however as we’re all working remotely now we thought it was worthwhile writing a guide to help prospective employees know what to expect when interviewing with Findmypast for an engineering position.

Solving DNS lookup failures in Kubernetes

Our journey along the Kuberentes (K8s) road continues with the story of how we diagnosed and solved random, intermittent DNS lookup failures between K8s pods and also between pods and services external to our K8s cluster.

The Journey to Kubernetes High Availability - Part 4

Findmypast (FMP) software engineering practises and operational practices have changed considerably over the last few years. We’ve moved from a “classic” monolithic web service, where deployments to production were applied possibly weeks after the end of a sprint, to a microservices approach where we have continuous deployment to production and the majority of the FMP service is managed by Kubernetes.

The Journey to Kubernetes High Availability - Part 3

Findmypast (FMP) software engineering practises and operational practices have changed considerably over the last few years. We’ve moved from a “classic” monolithic web service, where deployments to production were applied possibly weeks after the end of a sprint, to a microservices approach where we have continuous deployment to production and the majority of the FMP service is managed by Kubernetes.

The Journey to Kubernetes High Availability - Part 2

Findmypast (FMP) software engineering practises and operational practices have changed considerably over the last few years. We’ve moved from a “classic” monolithic web service, where deployments to production were applied possibly weeks after the end of a sprint, to a microservices approach where we have continuous deployment to production and the majority of the FMP service is managed by Kubernetes.

The Journey to Kubernetes High Availability - Part 1

Findmypast (FMP) software engineering practises and operational practices have changed considerably over the last few years. We’ve moved from a “classic” monolithic web service, where deployments to production were applied possibly weeks after the end of a sprint, to a microservices approach where we have continuous deployment to production and the majority of the FMP service is managed by Kubernetes.

Highly Available Postgres Databases

High Availability (HA) means that users can run their critical production services without worrying about a database becoming unavailable due to the failure of a database component. It improves the reliability of running a database by minimizing downtime and ensuring that the service is never down for more than a few seconds in the event of a failure.

FMP Recruiting DO’s and DON’T’s

We’ve been doing a lot of hiring here recently at FMP, both in London and Dundee (and we’re still hiring!). Along the way we’ve noticed some patterns (and some anti-patterns!) and we thought it would be useful to share with the wider interwebz in the hopes that people will get something useful out of it. With the caveat that each company will hire differently and has different standards, here are some DO’s and DON’T’s from the FMP Engineering team:

GraphQL Schema Modeling: Part 1

The power of GraphQL is that it allows a client to query all parts of a system simultaneously, flexibly and safely. The difficulty of GraphQL is that you now need to publish a schema that describes every public-facing part of your system while being consistent, coherent and understandable. This is often a positive challenge — the need to publish a consistent public API can guide backend development to better patterns — but it is a challenge nevertheless.

TDD, what do you expect?

TDD, Test driven development. If you don’t know what it is I envy and salute you. These days TDD is like one of those other terms, eg. Agile, MVC, Lean, SOLID. We love acronyms in our profession, and as developers we need to know them all, even if we don’t use it. In my opinion that is because it is used by people that don’t fully understand the value of them and they use it as a weapon against us. They are even making millions by using them, can you imagine?

Do not WIP

I’m sure you are familiar with the term WIP, just in case Work In Progress. It relates to something that is not finished yet, there’s a bit more way to go before completing it. I’ve been using Trunk-based development for some time now. We commit and push straight to master at FMP.

GRAPHical Family Trees

This post uses a graph database to show your family tree to you in a new way and shows you how to query it too. It serves as a basic introduction to Graph Databases and shows what a powerful tool they are.

Technical debt

I was chatting with my wife a while back and I flippantly dropped technical debt into our conversation. She asked me to describe it to her. I couldn’t. Well not in a way that made any sense whatsoever! Now that I’ve had some time to think I’m going to give it a bash.

Consumer Driven Contracts with Jackal

Technology and techniques from the engineering and design teams at Findmypast

How an intern outdid a senior engineer…

With mentoring and coaching, could a 3rd year software intern out perform a senior engineer?