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Findmypast Tech

tech.findmypast.com

Technology and techniques from the Findmypast Tech teams

Software / engineering practiceDevOps / SRE / infrastructureTesting / QAEngineering management / careersEngineering blogs

’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
90 from 13 Sep 2015 to 20 Oct 2026
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
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2026 1

  1. The Technology Behind the Names: How We're Bringing Local War Memorials to Life

2023 1

  1. DevOps at Findmypast: How Spanners implement DevOps Practices

2022 8

  1. DevOps at Findmypast: Postgres Database Upgrades
  2. Data Science at FMP: Tree Structure Analysis
  3. Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 3
  4. Testing Library ByRole Performance Improvements
  5. Team Diversity
  6. Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 2
  7. 2
  8. Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 1

2021 6

  1. Data Science at FMP: Dataset Recommendation
  2. Data Science at FMP: Network Science
  3. Migrating a GitHub Pages hosted Jekyll blog to version 4 with the help of GitHub Actions How we migrated our GitHub Pages hosted blog from Jekyll version 3.8 to 4.2 with the help of GitHub Actions Jonathan Darrer February 17th, 2021
  4. Running ASP.NET applications on Windows nodes in a Kubernetes cluster How we experimented with Windows nodes in Kubernetes clusters to run an ASP.NET application inside Docker Attila Molnar February 5th, 2021
  5. 3
  6. Making history: insights from inside a genealogy product team At Findmypast, our users are family history researchers. Here's how their needs shape our work Carianne Whitworth January 25th, 2021

2020 10

  1. Round up of the last year A look back at the past year, beginning my first role in software development as a pandemic struck Alexandra O'Mahony December 30th, 2020
  2. Using BDD at Findmypast A subjective view of using Behaviour-Driven Development at Findmypast Miroslaw 'Mirek' Majka December 10th, 2020
  3. Learning Swarm A Learning Swarm is designed to be a highly effective way to rapidly generate shared knowledge within a team on a topic they previously had no experience in. Gavin Henderson November 16th, 2020
  4. Accessibility First A few simple considerations transform Mobile First into Accessibility First Laura Green September 3rd, 2020
  5. My onboarding experience at Findmypast Working as a Junior DevOps engineer at Findmypast Conor Sturgess August 28th, 2020
  6. 4
  7. Findmypast Onboarding Experience First impressions on joining Findmypast when working from home Miroslaw 'Mirek' Majka August 17th, 2020
  8. My Onboarding Experience What is it like onboarding at Findmypast? John Parsons August 14th, 2020
  9. Buy or Build? How we decide if we should buy software or build it? Gavin Henderson August 4th, 2020
  10. Solving DNS lookup failures in Kubernetes How we solved random DNS lookup failures in Kubernetes Mike Thomas March 11th, 2020

2019 6

  1. The Journey to Kubernetes High Availability - Part 4 How FMP migrated deployments to high availability Kubernetes cluster Mike Thomas October 28th, 2019
  2. The Journey to Kubernetes High Availability - Part 3 How FMP migrated deployments to high availability Kubernetes cluster Mike Thomas July 24th, 2019
  3. 5
  4. The Journey to Kubernetes High Availability - Part 2 How FMP migrated deployments to high availability Kubernetes cluster Mike Thomas June 24th, 2019
  5. The Journey to Kubernetes High Availability - Part 1 How FMP migrated deployments to high availability Kubernetes cluster Mike Thomas May 23rd, 2019
  6. Highly Available Postgres Databases How to add several nines to your DB uptime. Andy Wilde + 1 other April 25th, 2019

2018 9

  1. FMP Recruiting DO’s and DON’T’s What you should do and what you shouldn't to get hired as a software engineer at Findmypast German Munoz December 4th, 2018
  2. GraphQL Schema Modeling: Part 1 How to design a GraphQL schema that is extensible and maintainable Jae Bach Hardie November 7th, 2018
  3. Co-author commits with Git Mob A command-line tool for social coding. Manage and add co-authors to your commits. Richard Kotze + 1 other April 12th, 2018
  4. 6
  5. Searching for Solr How we get from raw data to sub-second searches across nearly 3 billion records. Alex Clark March 18th, 2018
  6. TDD, what do you expect? Think about what do you expect when doing TDD (and a few other thoughts along the way) Juan Flores March 4th, 2018
  7. The Many Facets Of Solr Explore Solr and its faceting features from a beginner's perspective. Alex Clark March 1st, 2018
  8. Do not WIP Why you shouldn't commit WIP Juan Flores February 22nd, 2018
  9. GRAPHical Family Trees Turn your family tree into a graph to visualize it and query it Alex Clark February 20th, 2018

2017 12

  1. Technical debt What is technical debt? Neil Crawford December 6th, 2017
  2. A lightweight GraphQL (Part I) Let's see how Relay works under the hood to fetch data for us. Juan Flores May 2nd, 2017
  3. Consumer Driven Contracts with Jackal Development of a Consumer-Driven Contracts Microservice using NodeJS Oleksandr Stasyk May 2nd, 2017
  4. 7
  5. How an intern outdid a senior engineer… With mentoring and coaching, could we take a 3rd year software intern and turn them into a full stack developer Laurie Mills April 19th, 2017
  6. FMP co-sponsors London Elixir Meetup A summary of two talks about Elixir development German Munoz March 17th, 2017
  7. SQL Server in Elixir, Part 2: Process Management Developing a SQL Server adapter for Ecto Jae Bach Hardie March 14th, 2017
  8. SQL Server in Elixir, Part 1: Connecting Developing a SQL Server adapter for Ecto Jae Bach Hardie March 14th, 2017
  9. 8
  10. Pursuing mastery as a software engineer - part 2 My own experience of putting my learning about mastery into practice Neil Crawford March 6th, 2017
  11. Pursuing mastery as a software engineer - part 1 A proposed framework for focused learning in software engineering Neil Crawford February 24th, 2017
  12. FMP goes to the Elixir Meetup group in London A summary of two talks about Elixir development German Munoz February 22nd, 2017

2016 29

  1. A Step by Step Guide to Building a Form Using Relay and GraphQL. Part One: Mutations How to build a simple form using React and GraphQL Leigh Shepperson November 28th, 2016
  2. Feature Toggles and A/B testing How FMP manage to separate deployment from feature release using trunk based development and feature toggles Mike Thomas November 15th, 2016
  3. Extracting a Microservice from a Monolith Our step by step approach to refactoring our Monolith into a platform of Microservices Neil Crawford October 5th, 2016
  4. Elixir Maintainability Tools used to increase maintainability in an Elixir project Steven Blowers September 23rd, 2016
  5. 9
  6. Testing React using Enzyme - a novice's quick guide An overview of how we test React using Enzyme, from a novice javascripter's point of view Laura Green September 15th, 2016
  7. Twoface and blue green deployment Implementing blue/green deployment using docker, service discovery and home grown friends! Oleksandr Stasyk September 8th, 2016
  8. Testing React using Enzyme This article explains why and how to use Enzyme. Richard Kotze August 31st, 2016
  9. Repository Driven Development A super efficient day-to-day development experience. Never look anywhere except the code in the repository you are working in to test, release and manage your software Neil Crawford August 21st, 2016
  10. usher-cli - A Node.js CLI for stitching together command line interfaces Simplify and standardise your application deployment scripts Neil Crawford July 22nd, 2016
  11. Elixir magic for fun and profit! Discovering how to use macros, and hey, look ma, no ifs! Andy Mendelsohn July 17th, 2016
  12. 10
  13. Achieving Continuous Delivery of Microservices Building a delivery pipeline to support a microservices architecture Jae Bach Hardie July 8th, 2016
  14. Deployment and Infrastructure at Findmypast A great walkthrough on how we do continuous integration and continuous deployment in Findmypast Oleksandr Stasyk June 28th, 2016
  15. Sitemaps as a Microservice Sitemaps and their place in the new Microservice architecture Liam Humphreys June 15th, 2016
  16. MapSet in Elixir Mahmut Surekci June 2nd, 2016
  17. Learn your tools well Professional software developers need to know their tools well. Juan Flores June 1st, 2016
  18. Unit testing Legacy code Unit testing Legacy code, Boy Scout rule and more Juan Flores May 25th, 2016
  19. 11
  20. Don't mock what you don't own How to integrate unit testing with third party libraries Juan Flores April 19th, 2016
  21. Don't fail to fail Don't fail Juan Flores April 14th, 2016
  22. Change one thing This isn't about code, it's about change Andy Mendelsohn March 17th, 2016
  23. Introduction to Elixir Basics to start playing with Elixir in the Interactive shell Juan Flores March 4th, 2016
  24. Creating cookies in Javascript We show you how to create cookies in Javascript and strategies for testing Leigh Shepperson February 12th, 2016
  25. Learning strategies for Developers Effective developers are learners but not all learners are equal Stephen Cassels February 10th, 2016
  26. 12
  27. Put your textbooks down! How to influence change Pete Gore January 29th, 2016
  28. Using Pattern Matching to write a more idiomatic functional code Use pattern matching to change your Object Oriented Programming mindset Juan Flores January 15th, 2016
  29. A picture tells a thousand words Plant UML diagrams are a great way of quickly sharing complex system behaviour and architecture Neil Crawford January 12th, 2016

2015 8

  1. Missing Maps Findmypast uses open source maps - and then gives back through humanitarian 'armchair mapping' Laura Green December 21st, 2015
  2. Getting up and running with Phoenix and Elixir Using Vagrant to get a basic environment to run Phoenix and Elixir Juan Flores December 7th, 2015
  3. How I keep up to date in the software industry Keeping up in software is hard, here are some techniques I use to get my information Neil Crawford November 27th, 2015
  4. 13
  5. Judge the code, not the developer Judge the code, not the developer Asier Barrenetxea November 26th, 2015
  6. Pair programming - from a Junior's perspective Experiences of a junior developer doing pair programming Mahmut Surekci October 16th, 2015
  7. Stubbing dependencies in commonJS Stubbing dependencies in commonJS Richard Kotze October 9th, 2015
  8. Welcome to FMP Tech! Welcome to FMP Tech! Andy Mendelsohn September 13th, 2015