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What’s your stock portfolio return?

March 03, 2011

Consider the following scenario: you invest your money starting with $100K in a brokerage account, and buy some AAPL shares at $200. Then you transfer $5K more into the account and buy some AMZN shares at $120. Later on you sell your APPL shares when it reaches $300. In the end you transfer $10K out… Read more

Protobufs backward and forward

March 02, 2011

Protobufs are designed to support forward and backward compatibility, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it wrong. One issue we ran into recently involved adding a new value to an enum. The protobuf code “worked” in the sense that it did not blow up, but our code that used the data failed. Since at… Read more

Born Small… Now Huge… Winning… Bring it..!

March 01, 2011

Made a wallpaper in honor of my new favorite tweeter… Charlie Sheen. Hope you guys like it. Winning!

Encrypting using gpg from Java

February 23, 2011

Recently, we worked with a third-party that had trouble reading files encrypted using the Bouncy Castle’s OpenPGP implementation. We ended up deciding to rely directly on the GNU Privacy Guard’s OpenPGP implementation. As I didn’t find any working example on the web, I figured that the following piece of code might end up being useful… Read more

Continuous Deployment for Data, Not Just Services

February 22, 2011

Last week, I made a mistake which caused some pages of our website to be unavailable for several minutes. I was developing a new feature that allows our customers to see how the money managers of our platform have been sticking to their investing strategy in the past, which we consider a key ingredient in… Read more

Bulletproof Rails Asset Caching

February 18, 2011

We’ve been using Rails at Wealthfront for nearly two years and we love it, but there’s no denying that, out of the box, Rails asset caching is broken. Below we’ll identify the problems, define requirements for a successful strategy, and then describe how we meet those requirements at Wealthfront. Background For the uninitiated, the term… Read more