Experiments with AI Code Review
Part of a series on Wealthfront’s AI Developer Tooling Why Code Review? At Wealthfront, our arc of AI adoption has followed a familiar pattern: from skepticism to experimentation to deep adoption in the code lifecycle. Just a few years ago, in the dark era of “AI coding is just fancy autocomplete,” we heard rumors of… Read more
7 Words, 7 Journeys: The Wealthfront New College Grad Experience
There’s a common saying that life is a series of opening and closing doors. When you graduate college, you’re handed a master key that unlocks countless doors in your path. This is a pivotal time – that first door you choose to walk through sets the foundation for the rest of your career. Two years… Read more
Tuning Android build nodes for maximum throughput
Introduction Our Android team uses Gradle as our build tool of choice. Gradle offers lots of options for tuning its resource consumption, giving engineers an opportunity to optimize performance for running tasks on well-known hardware. In this post, we’ll explore how the team tuned our Gradle setup for Amazon’s m7i.8xlarge EC2 instances. General concepts Before… Read more
Putting the Tech in Fintech: How We Use FIX to Execute Trades at Scale
At Wealthfront, the “tech” in financial technology isn’t just a buzzword—it’s the foundation of everything we build. Beneath the intuitive frontend our clients interact with lies a complex ecosystem of distributed systems. One of the most critical pieces of that backend architecture is the engine that enables us to route massive volumes of trades efficiently. … Read more
How we standardized MariaDB in our Integration Server
Engineering at Wealthfront is centered on the idea that code should be written to facilitate testing, not the other way around. Without a staging environment to fall back on, we maximize confidence through a sophisticated, multi-layered testing strategy. While unit tests provide our most rigorous line of defense, our Integration Server is the workhorse that… Read more
XcodeGen and the quest to modularize the Wealthfront iOS app
Every iOS application starts as a monolith. Xcode’s default project structure places all source files, resources, and build configuration into a single module (or target, for all the iOS devs reading this). For small apps, this works fine. For a 10+ year old financial application with roughly 2,000 Swift and a handful of Objective-C files,… Read more