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
New Leaders, New Perspectives: Why We Joined Wealthfront Engineering
At Wealthfront, our engineering culture is something you experience as soon as you join the organization, and new hires are regularly surprised by how quickly and fully they begin to contribute and drive impact. We sat down with two of our new engineering managers, Melissa and Sanjana, to hear how quickly they were able to… Read more
The Hidden Cost of Convenience: Rethinking Old ORM Patterns for Scale
Ever been here before? Stuck with a job that needs to be continually revisited because its performance gets worse with every passing day, and each attempt at improving said performance yields diminishing returns? This is the situation we found ourselves in with the portfolio balance calculation system—the code responsible for aggregating data from multiple sources… Read more
Automating Exhaustive Branch Coverage for Sealed Types in Kotlin
We take code correctness and code quality seriously at Wealthfront. One of the most effective ways we ensure that our code is correct is through rigorous unit testing and strong typing. In Kotlin, sealed classes and sealed interfaces offer a powerful tool to model restricted class hierarchies. They provide strong guarantees about the types in… Read more
ValidUntil: Ensuring compile-time data integrity in our investing system
As a financial services company, it is paramount that our investing system makes decisions based on accurate, up-to-date, and valid data. A single bad input can lead to disastrous outcomes, including costly trading mistakes and a loss of client trust. At Wealthfront, we built a system called ValidUntil that allows engineers to have confidence that… Read more