The Technology Behind the Names: How We’re Bringing Local War Memorials to Life In a recent survey, 73% of respondents said they believe the stories behind the names on local war memorials are getting lost, and only 27% were confident they could name even one person commemorated on their local memorial. We wanted to change that and bring people the stories behind the names on their local WW1 memorials. At scale, this is no small feat. What we know about any one soldier is scattered across dozens of record sets, both military and civilian. But with Findmypast’s records and newspaper archive,…
Introduction There are many ways to define DevOps and even more ways to implement its core principles within an organisation. To the Spanners team, DevOps is an iterative and collaborative approach to the development, testing, deployment and monitoring of software services. Overall, there is a great deal of alignment with the thoughts outlined by Mueller and Willis regarding what DevOps is, and how it is best implemented. Spanners see our role within the wider engineering cohort at Findmypast as advocates for DevOps principles and practices, and the vehicle through which those practices can…
Introduction Findmypast and its sister site; the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), are served by a web of microservices operating across multiple Kubernetes clusters. A number of our microservices rely upon a back-end database, and although we do operate other database technologies (MSSQL, MongoDB etc.), Postgres is our de-facto standard for relational databases. When the DevOps team first realised the need to upgrade all of the database nodes to the latest Postgres version, we operated a total of twelve production Postgres databases, each running on their own dedicated Ubuntu Linux virtual…
Introduction A key part of our product is the ability to build family trees on our site. To better understand how our customers are building and using the tree features we wanted to work out what sort of structure the trees generally have and answer questions like how many generations do users have? Do users follow their pedigree line, their parents, grandparents and so on or build out their other relations? Do users focus on a paternal or maternal line or both? Trees can be quite complex structures with a lot of information contained within them. For example, a small tree with just a mother,…
Findmypast (FMP) released the 1921 Census of England & Wales at midnight on Jan 6th 2022 to an eager community of genealogists. The preparation of the census - preservation, digitisation and transcription took three years of hard work. Aside from the data preparation, we also had technical challenges to address. Specifically, could our services deal with the projected increase in users for the first few days of 1921 launch period? This post is the third in a series that details how we approached scaling our service to deal with a projected day one 12x increase of users. Digging deeper into…
We use Testing Library to test our React UI pages and components. For example, we may have the following HelpFaqsTile component in a page: const HelpFaqsTile = () => ( CardWithStyleOverrides data-testid="help-faqs-tile"> DashboardImage src={require('../../assets/cartoon-lifebelt.png')} alt="a floating lifesaver" /> TileContentWrapper> h4>Need some help?/h4> p>Our FAQs are a lifesaver/p> Button as={Link} to="/help"> Search FAQs /Button> /TileContentWrapper> /CardWithStyleOverrides> ); export default HelpFaqsTile; Let suppose we want to test whether “the ‘Help Faqs’ tile provides a link with…
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. We’re a diverse bunch in terms of age, gender, ethnicity & cultures but also in terms of generational insight, platform and domain knowledge and…
Findmypast (FMP) released the 1921 Census of England & Wales at midnight on Jan 6th 2022 to an eager community of genealogists. The preparation of the census - preservation, digitisation and transcription took three years of hard work. Aside from the data preparation, we also had technical challenges to address. Specifically, could our services deal with the projected increase in users for the first few days of 1921 launch period? This post is the second in a series that details how we approached scaling our service to deal with a projected day one 12x increase of users. If you haven’t…
Findmypast (FMP) released the 1921 Census of England & Wales at midnight on Jan 6th 2022 to an eager community of genealogists. The preparation of the census - preservation, digitisation and transcription took three years of hard work. Aside from the data preparation, we also had technical challenges to address. Specifically, could our services deal with the projected increase in users for the first few days of 1921 launch period? This post is the first in a series that details how we approached scaling our service to deal with a projected day one 12x increase of users. In the beginning……
Problem Outline One of the problems we recently tackled in the data science team was how we could introduce our users to new datasets they may not be familiar with. We wanted these datasets to be personal to each user and relevant to their research areas. A recommendation system of some sort was the obvious way to solve this problem. Recommendation Systems Recommendation systems come with several possible methodologies. Two of the most widely known methodologies are Collaborative Filtering (which can be split into two branches, user-based or item-based) and Content-Based Filtering. User-based…
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