Engineering Display Hack Day
What do we do when we have eight large TVs in the office driven by Mac Minis and a need to put our finger on the pulse of the business? We hold a hack day for the displays! We allocated a Friday to seeing what interesting visualizations and summaries we could put up on the… Read more
Testing Cascading applications
This post explores how we apply our test-driven-development philosophy to analytics problems. In particular, it shows how use test-driven development with Cascading, which we’ve recently started using to drive analytics at Wealthfront. Cascading let’s us specify complicated analytics pipelines in Java. It works well for problems that would normally require multiple MapReduce jobs to get a… Read more
Marketside chats #2: Options for non-dummies
This article will explain some common misconceptions about options, using some simplifications. (1) It is not applicable to typical startup call options. (2) A call option allows you to buy a stock at a specified strike price by a specified expiration date. For a put option, replace ‘buy’ with ‘sell’. An option can be thought… Read more
Pushing a Feature On My First Day
One of my main reasons for joining Wealthfront was its engineering culture. After meeting the team as well as perusing the engineering blogs, I was excited to start working here. So how did the first day fare? Well I was setup with all of the major projects, finished work on a small feature for… Read more
Mocking Java enums with jMock is both trivial and impossible
I recently ran into a situation where I needed to test some code that used an enum to select between various strategies. As a toy example of this, we’ll use Accounts which have a list of investments and a Strategy which defines what investments are acceptable. View the code on Gist. Strategy is a Java… Read more
Building your street cred — A career forum for women in tech hosted by Wealthfront
You’re invited to join Wealthfront and Femgineer for an evening of professional connections, lessons on “street cred,” great presenters, and food. Lots of food. Wealthfront is proud to host October’s Femgineer forum on the topic of Street Cred on Tuesday, October 22nd at 6pm in Palo Alto, CA. Femgineer co-founder Karen Catlin will discuss “Street… Read more