Performant CSS Animations: Netflix Case Study
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
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
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
Similarities of Disruptive Companies
At the end of our Wealthfront Onboarding program, we ask new team members what about Wealthfront most differs from their prior expectations. The most common answer is “Wealthfront is not a finance company.” This answer is unsurprising in retrospect, as it reflects a common yet fundamental misunderstanding of disruptive companies: many people believe startups win… Read more
Pattern matching in Java with the Visitor pattern
I once read an essay—I cannot find it now—that talked about how learning a more advanced programming language can improve your coding even in a language that lacks those features because those language features are really ways of thinking, and there’s no reason you cannot think in terms of more powerful abstractions just because you… Read more
WF-CRAN: R Package Management at Wealthfront
R is a powerful statistical programming language with a large range of built-in capabilities that are further augmented by an extensive set of third-party packages available through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). At Wealthfront, R is an important tool with many use cases across the company. These include analyzing our business metrics to enable… Read more