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Joining Wealthfront as a new college graduate

September 13, 2013

The First Day On my first day as a backend engineer at Wealthfront I received an overview of our architecture by one of our engineers. During the overview I realized I would be working with several technologies and flow patterns with which I was completely unfamiliar. Fortunately for me, Wealthfront was forward thinking in choosing… Read more

Functional CSS (FCSS)

August 20, 2013

We’re big fans of functional programming at Wealthfront. Emphasizing immutability and functional style means fewer “surprises” because side-effects are limited or nonexistent. We can quickly build up large systems from discrete, focused components by way of composition. Applying such principles is straight forward in most languages, even if they’re not functional by definition, but the… Read more

ActiveJsonEntity and ActiveRecord’s shared DNA

June 26, 2013

New to ActiveJsonEntity? Check out the introduction. As a new engineer at Wealthfront, I’ve been getting my hands dirty migrating our existing hand-written models to ActiveJsonEntity models. It’s been a tremendous way to get to know our existing codebase and appreciate the power of ActiveJsonEntity. Coming from a traditional Rails background, I wanted to make… Read more

ActiveJsonEntity: Bridging the gap between Rails and Java

June 13, 2013

We have a service-based architecture here at Wealthfront. Instead of our Rails layer talking to a database, it makes RPC calls over HTTP to a collection of services that send and receive JSON. Without a database we can’t use ActiveRecord, and all the niceties it provides. In their first incarnation, our models were plain Ruby… Read more

Move cash faster

May 31, 2013

I joined Wealthfront last week as a new engineer, and I recently wrapped up my first meaty development project within the backend trading system written in Java. The task was to modify the logic used for client withdrawals. Specifically, add logic to first pull from any incoming deposit money that is sitting in escrow, waiting… Read more

The first week at Wealthfront

May 17, 2013

I just finished my first week at Wealthfront. In my first three hours I fixed a small production bug. By the end of the week, I had shipped my first feature: the backend code to serve up the commit statistics feeding the visualization at our new engineering page. Moving this quick was empowering, and it… Read more