Functional CSS (FCSS)
We’re big fans of functional programming at Wealthfront. Emphasizing immutability and functional style means fewer “surprises” because side-effects are limited or nonexistent. We can quickly build up large systems from discrete, focused components by way of composition. Applying such principles is straight forward in most languages, even if they’re not functional by definition, but the… Read more
ActiveJsonEntity and ActiveRecord’s shared DNA
New to ActiveJsonEntity? Check out the introduction. As a new engineer at Wealthfront, I’ve been getting my hands dirty migrating our existing hand-written models to ActiveJsonEntity models. It’s been a tremendous way to get to know our existing codebase and appreciate the power of ActiveJsonEntity. Coming from a traditional Rails background, I wanted to make… Read more
ActiveJsonEntity: Bridging the gap between Rails and Java
We have a service-based architecture here at Wealthfront. Instead of our Rails layer talking to a database, it makes RPC calls over HTTP to a collection of services that send and receive JSON. Without a database we can’t use ActiveRecord, and all the niceties it provides. In their first incarnation, our models were plain Ruby… Read more
Move cash faster
I joined Wealthfront last week as a new engineer, and I recently wrapped up my first meaty development project within the backend trading system written in Java. The task was to modify the logic used for client withdrawals. Specifically, add logic to first pull from any incoming deposit money that is sitting in escrow, waiting… Read more
The first week at Wealthfront
I just finished my first week at Wealthfront. In my first three hours I fixed a small production bug. By the end of the week, I had shipped my first feature: the backend code to serve up the commit statistics feeding the visualization at our new engineering page. Moving this quick was empowering, and it… Read more
I can haz lambda on Java 7?
Superficially, lambda expressions in Java 8 are just syntactic sugar for instances anonymous inner classes. Syntactic sugar should not require classfile changes, so one might expect that code compiled with Java 8 lambdas could run on a Java 7 JRE. It turns out that you can’t do this, and not just because of an automatic… Read more