Worlds Collide
Before I ever became interested in finance or big data, I was working on software for real-time, concurrent embedded systems. I was the main contributor for the Soft Walls project, a 9/11-inspired project where we were designing aircraft control algorithms to prevent pilots from entering no-fly zones. I was later a contributor to the Ptolemy… Read more
Two Hour Change Leads to Three More Years.
A short time ago I was applying for jobs at a select few software companies. As an applicant, I tried to determine which company would not only allow for internal improvement in coding and self, but also an environment which I could actively influence. Many might find it appealing enough to fit inside of a… Read more
Wealthfront hosts October’s Femgineer Forum
We were really happy to host this month’s Femgineer Forum here in our office. Karen Catlin gave her insightful presentation on how to create and maintain one’s “street cred”: ways to document your successes and help people find out about your strengths whether it be in the open source community or on LinkedIn. The line… Read more
Engineering Display Hack Day
What do we do when we have eight large TVs in the office driven by Mac Minis and a need to put our finger on the pulse of the business? We hold a hack day for the displays! We allocated a Friday to seeing what interesting visualizations and summaries we could put up on the… Read more
Testing Cascading applications
This post explores how we apply our test-driven-development philosophy to analytics problems. In particular, it shows how use test-driven development with Cascading, which we’ve recently started using to drive analytics at Wealthfront. Cascading let’s us specify complicated analytics pipelines in Java. It works well for problems that would normally require multiple MapReduce jobs to get a… Read more
Marketside chats #2: Options for non-dummies
This article will explain some common misconceptions about options, using some simplifications. (1) It is not applicable to typical startup call options. (2) A call option allows you to buy a stock at a specified strike price by a specified expiration date. For a put option, replace ‘buy’ with ‘sell’. An option can be thought… Read more