Tradeoffs in AB Testing Frameworks
At Wealthfront, the A/B test is one of our most powerful decision-making tools. It helps us make decisions under uncertainty, and learn about how our clients are reacting to new features we build. Our own framework has been a particularly featured one, supporting Bayesian inference methods, continuous stopping criteria, check metrics, and multiple variants. Recently,… Read more
Scaling Beyond MySQL
Wealthfront is growing fast, and the quantity of data we collect is growing faster. With the launch of Path, we’ve seen a large increase in the number of non-Wealthfront accounts our customers have linked over time (see below). We have plans to increase the breadth of automated financial advice we provide for our clients, so… Read more
Introducing Our New Operating System
Last week we unveiled our new brokerage and banking platform, Wealthfront’s largest engineering undertaking to date. This investment in our infrastructure will serve as the foundation for our next generation of products and services, supporting our mission to make sophisticated private wealth management services available to everyone. When Legacy Holds You Back Wealthfront, like many… Read more
Integrating D3 into React
D3 and React are both incredibly popular. Unfortunately, if you try to integrate D3 into a React application, you’ll hit some snags due to differences in how they each manipulate the DOM. I’ll discuss the problem, the existing ways the community has tackled it, and the approach Wealthfront took. Note that the choice we made… Read more
A specific trick and a general habit for achieving fast computations
I recently worked on a computation involved in a client-facing projection graph. In order to delight our users, we wanted it to respond instantly to user interaction. However, there are two forces at play that make the calculation complicated: the consistent contributions of recurring deposits and the erratic motion of stock prices. We needed to… Read more
Reflective Metatesting. Protecting You from Yourself and Everybody Else.
Infrastructure projects often take user-defined configuration classes as input. I’ve worked on several during my tenure at Wealthfront. You cannot trust the validity of these configurations, even if you wrote them yourself. A pattern I’ve grown to love is writing JUnit tests that use reflection to gather all the input classes to run a suite… Read more