Ancestry is a large company that provides family history and DNA testing services. It has over 1 billion records in its databases and over 3 million subscribers. As an Android developer at Ancestry, a typical day involves collaborating with teammates to work on user stories, addressing bugs, learning new skills, and ensuring code quality. Developers focus on testing, code reviews, following best practices, and balancing individual and team work. The goal is to build high quality features while continuously improving skills.

1. Ancestry Android Developer
Skills, Techniques, and Patterns
because it’s not all about the code

2. About Ancestry
gest provider of family history and personal DNA testing, harnessing the information fou
enetics and health history to help people gain a new level of understanding about their
n paying subscribers across its family history websites and approximately 1.2 million D
abase. Since 1996, more than 16 billion records have been added, and users have crea
on the Ancestry flagship site and its affiliated international websites. Ancestry offers a s
Archives, Fold3, Newspapers.com and AncestryDNA sold by its subsidiary, Ancestry.c
the AncestryHealth product, offered by its subsidiary AncestryHealth.com, LLC.
·
e than 1,300 employees located around the world, with 1,000 employees in Utah; 175 e
Francisco, California and approximately 70 employees in Dublin, Ireland.

3. A day in the life at Ancestry
• Let’s take a stroll…

4. Morning time
• Get a drink, put your headphones on
• Time to grab a story
• Sprints
• Agile Manifesto

5. Story
• Yikes. The feature in the story is bigger than we sized it
• “Build or buy”
• Third party libraries
• How to choose?

6. How to find libraries
• Primarily
• Git hub - codepath/android_guides
• android-arsenal.com
• Secondarily
• Google it…
• Github search

7. How to choose libraries
• Who developed it?
• Google, Square, Jake Warton
• Big names (Facebook - flatbuffers)
• How complex is it?
• Do other developers respond to it at stackoverflow? Reddit?
• Github… How many stargazers? When last updated?

8. Putting out fires
• Embedded QA finds a nasty bug
• Is it in the store build?
• Check Crashlytics (fabric.io)

9. It’s a bad one :(
• Bug is in the store build and crashlytics shows it is widespread
• Gotta halt work on the story. You created a feature branch right?
• git flow (Thank you Vincent Driessen)
• NPE (Maybe Kotlin for the next app)
• Fix or Bandaid?

10. Bandaid it!
• Get it stop crashing for the users now
• Make a new bug to get to the bottom of it later

11. No! Fix it!
• Geez, you want to be a good engineer don’t you?
• Variables include
• Time
• Team

12. Get some more eyes on it
• You made a change
• Can’t just check it in to the Master, that’s sacred
• Even if you really want to
• Get it on it’s own branch
• Have other devs inspect it first
• Then merge!

13. Make a new build
• Build machine makes a new build for the store
• QA gets their hands on it and tests your changes
• Thumbs up or down
• Inform Project Manager
• She’s sitting between you and your users

14. Lunch!
• It’s actually important
• Solo if your in the groove or really busy
• Shaky Leaf cafe (soon to get Pizza oven!)
• Otherwise hang with team and talk shop
• Well ok, maybe you can talk about other stuff too

15. Lunch++
• Ping pong
• Foosball
• Yoga
• Back massages
• Soccer

16. Back to the story
• I’ve added a third party library that’s going to save me some time!
Huzzah!
• But now I’m faced with a design decision
• Material Design Pattern
• UX Designer
• Refactor some other stuff around the area you are working in

17. Patterns
• Minimal disruption
• Use the pattern that is already there
• If it needs refactoring, think about the consequences of doing it
now
• Easy? Go ahead
• Not so easy? Make a tech story

18. Design Patterns
• Keep you ears open
• Some patterns in Java are anti-patterns in Android
• Factory
• Singleton (not as bad as you think!)
• Adapter
• Iterator
• Observer

19. Think about testing
• QA will love you
• Unit tests
• JUnit
• Dagger
• Save a lot of headache
• FORCE yourself to do them

20. “So how is it going?”
• PM wants to see how the work is progressing
• May want to head him off at the pass
• Better to get input as soon as you make some headway
• Law - All changes are make to handle the further they are away
from the end user

21. Story created In Progress Almost Done After merging

22. And don’t be like this

23. Backend API
• The story needs some more data from the backend
• REST
• Documentation is either old, bad, or nonexistent
• What to do?

24. Collaboration
• Agile Manifesto - “The most efficient and effective method of conveying
information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”
• Feature Teams vs. Core Teams
• Embedded Backend/UX/QA/PM
• Division of Labor
• See what the iOS team has done!
• Learn a little Objective-C and Swift

25. Your not just Android
• You are mobile!
• Radicalized Fanboyism is bad!

27. Collaborate
• Break out of the “introverted” stereotype
• Not good for you
• Not good for the company
• Don’t spin your wheels. Not getting it? Ask!

28. Take a break
• Pay the cat tax
• Videos
• Conference
• Performance Patterns
• Design Patterns

29. Head to the meeting
• PM has a list of cool features he wants in
• Size the stories
• Fibonacci numbers
• Myth of the man-hour

30. Wrap it up
• Put finishing touches
• Write up the test case
• Make it good one. No half-asses. Think edge cases
• Check it in, make a pull request
• Mark it (Target Process) and let QA take over

31. Go home.
• Do something else
• Dig into something you ran into that day you didn’t fully understand
• Make a list of these

32. Strange Days

33. It’s Thursday! Tech day!
• Code rot, technical debt
• Tech story
• I wanna do <xyz>

34. Super Huge Refactors
• Suck in some help from the feature teams
• Cooperation with other PM’s
• Tech days for weeks
• Test! Test! Test!

35. FedEx Days
• You got 24 hours to deliver

36. Mobile Hack-a-thon
• Like FedEx Days but you get to sleep at night
• Collaboration

37. Ancestry Engineers Conference
• 2 Days every summer
• San Fran, Ireland, UK, Germany
• Free shirt!
• Can do your own presentation
• Get to stand up and rant if you want
• Play time

38. In Conclusion
• Skills
• Android SDK, Java, Third-party libs, JSON, SQL
• Communication/Collaboration, Agile Processes
• Techniques
• Check with the team and PM’s as you go
• Testing
• Patterns
• Follow what Google has already set as an example
• Passion!

39. • Carl Hickman
• chickman@ancestry.com
• @happylrac