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Unit Testing for Sass with Sassaby

July 09, 2015

At Wealthfront we use Sass to write all of our CSS stylesheets. Sass is a powerful CSS pre-processor that allows you to leverage features common in programming languages, but are absent from native CSS. Using Sass variables, conditionals, loops, and functions, you can write extensible CSS that is easier to maintain across a large front-end… Read more

Performant CSS Animations: Netflix Case Study

June 30, 2015

While going over performant web animations with our new batch of interns, Netflix’s new redesign was brought up as an example of something that seemed to have DOM nodes that changed size and pushed other DOM nodes around. From my previous blog post on Performant Web Animations, animating properties such as width or top forces… Read more

An Introduction to CommonJS

June 16, 2015

The CommonJS specification includes a module loading syntax to cleanly specify JavaScript dependencies. While first widely used in Node it is now used heavily in the browser as well. Historically, when specifying dependencies for the browser, we have had to manually manage a list of our files and keep them in the right order. For… Read more

The Case for Object-Oriented JavaScript

August 12, 2014

JavaScript is a flexible and powerful programming language that drives most modern-day web sites and applications. The jQuery library, in particular, has a simple API for traversing and manipulating the DOM. Just choose a your selector, add an event handler, and voilà! Instant UI magic. The ease of jQuery, though, comes with a price. Without… Read more

Automating JavaScript Code Quality Checks

April 17, 2014

At Wealthfront, we’re big advocates for automation. In general, automation saves time and ensures consistency. One of the things we want to ensure is the quality of our JavaScript code. This is particularly important for JavaScript, given its weirdness. While this task can’t be fully automated, there’s some low hanging fruit available by automating linting… Read more

Reactive Charts with D3 and Reactive.js

April 18, 2013

New to Reactive.js? Check out last week’s introduction. All visualizations are ultimately a composition of smaller elements; data sets, scales, individual lines, and labels to name a few. Those elements relate to each other in different ways, and to manage their interdependency we typically find ourselves writing a master “render” method — something that can… Read more