Building Mobile A/B Testing Infrastructure
Twenty years ago, one would have hardly heard the phrase “A/B testing”. In 2000, Google served its first A/B test to determine the optimal number of search results to display. In 2011 alone, they ran 7000 A/B tests across their platforms. A/B testing has become the bread and butter of product decision-making for Silicon Valley… Read more
Build System Integration Testing with Chef
At Wealthfront, we’re constantly pushing to use cutting edge technologies to take advantage of new language features, improved compilers, new libraries, and the like. Downtime in our build system would be a big problem with how often we like pushing new code to production, so we want a process that would allow us to upgrade parts… Read more
3 Ways to Integrate Third-Party Metrics into Your Data Platform
From both a company and engineering standpoint, Wealthfront values making decisions backed by quantitative methods. As noted in our previous blog post, Statistics is Eating the World, the key to enabling decisions backed by data is to build a platform that is automated and can scale across all aspects of our business. One of the… Read more
How We Avoid A/B Testing Errors with Shrinkage
At Wealthfront, we use A/B tests to make our services more effective, informative, and convenient. Each A/B test consists of two or more variants of a feature or design, which we expose to visitors at random until we have have enough data to infer which is better. In a previous post, we explained why we… Read more
Testing JavaScript Modules
In our previous post we outlined benefits of writing JavaScript in modules. One benefit we didn’t mention was how much more testable JavaScript modules are. In your test file you can require the module under test and let the require system import any dependencies. The goal of this post is to outline some of the… Read more
Advice for the Transition from College to Industry
The transition from college to industry came with quite a few surprises and lessons. Reflecting back on own my experience, I want to share a few insights I’ve gained. Additionally I want to share habits I formed during my undergraduate that transitioned well, as well as those that required significant changes in order to assimilate… Read more