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Graceful Degradation in Spark Streaming Applications

November 03, 2017

Here on the Data Engineering Team at Wealthfront, we have recently been building out our Near Real-Time computation platform to provide the ability to ingest, process, and serve data to our backend and frontend services with very low round trip latency. This platform will be the backbone for a multitude of applications for us including… Read more

Testing D3 Transitions

October 26, 2017

Transitions are an important tool in our D3 arsenal that we can leverage to relate understanding of visualizations to others. They can be used to draw attention to some representation of the data, emphasize change, or highlight the effects of user interaction, among other things. Given these benefits, it’s critical in a test-driven culture like… Read more

D3: You’re amazing just the way you are

October 03, 2017

Abstraction is a technique for arranging computer systems in such a way as to reduce the complexity of interacting with them. The system makes a certain complexity level available for other systems to interact with, while suppressing some of the inner workings. Programming languages, for example, are abstractions over assembly languages, which are abstractions over… Read more

Reflecting on my summer internship at Wealthfront

September 05, 2017

A concern I’ve heard from classmates considering an internship at a tech startup is that the internship program at a startup may not be as well-formed and organized as that of a more established company. While this may be true for some startups, I found Wealthfront to very much be an exception. I had a… Read more

Building a Distributed Work Queue with MySQL and RabbitMQ

August 29, 2017

Many of the daily processes at Wealthfront follow a similar pattern: they perform some operation for each of a large list of items. For example, we might have a daily process that performs some optimization for each active account. This type of process usually operates through some form of work queue, and in the past… Read more

A Wealthfront ACATS Odyssey

August 24, 2017

Onboarding Client Cash and Assets Here at Wealthfront we attempt to make onboarding onto our platform as easy as possible. We provide a personalized asset allocation to any prospective client free-of-charge, but things only really get interesting for our brokerage platform during the next step: funding an account to make our recommendations a reality. Accounts… Read more