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Why We Use Bayesian Inference

September 01, 2015

At Wealthfront, we’re constantly experimenting with our products to make them better. Like other internet companies, we use a metrics-driven approach to test product changes. Each change is validated with an A/B test (hypothesis test), where we evaluate the change on a subset of clients by measuring its impact on some business metric, like the… Read more

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

Testing with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

July 02, 2015

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust. -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table At Wealthfront, we manage over $2.5 Billion in assets that we have been trusted with by our clients. Trust and transparency are the foundations of a strong relationship between a financial institution and… 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

Performant CSS Animations

May 19, 2015

Web performance can be split into two relatively distinct categories: first page load and subsequent interactions. We can improve the first load by decreasing the server response time, and optimizing the loading of CSS and Javascript. Once the website is loaded, there is a completely new set of performance related challenges: using a Javascript framework… Read more