My First Day
Today was my first day at Wealthfront. It was awesome. Let me explain a little about myself, so you understand my full meaning. I’m a product guy (Wealthfront’s first), and product guys are supposed to understand the user and the business. Strictly speaking, we aren’t supposed to write code. Even if we’re totally uncloseted geeks…. Read more
Quick-n-dirty: Font Awesome icon search utility
We love Font Awesome. It has a wealth of very useful icons and now that the set is up to 210 icons we’re also finding it unwieldy to search for that right icon. So we made a super simple search utility. Enter in part of the icon’s class name and matching classes will be displayed…. Read more
Using Underscore.js’s debounce() to filter double-clicks
Watching users double-click a form button always makes me cringe. Worse: knowing that AJAX is firing with each click. Instead if flooding our server with AJAX requests it would be nice to limit how frequently the click handler runs. Fortunately, libraries like Underscore.js have wonderful functions like throttle and debounce do just that. But which… Read more
jQuery.Deferred is the most important client-side tool you have
jQuery’s introduction of $.Deferred() is one of the library’s most powerful additions in recent history. It’s not a new idea, but it merits an introduction now that it’s available to thousands of client-side developers. At its core, the Deferred pattern is a simple but powerful tool for the management of asynchronous processes. As we all… Read more
On the humanity of mathematical models
A great deal of care is spent designing our algorithms and models at Wealthfront. The work of Qian Liu and others is put through trial runs against historical data, peer reviewed by members of the company, and vetted by outside advisors in the academic and private sectors. Along with Dr. Malkiel, we also work with… Read more
Hurricane Sandy puts YAGNI to the test
On Sunday night, Oct 29th, we learned that most US equities markets would be closed the next day due to Hurricane Sandy. This is very unusual: the only times the market has been closed since the four days following 9/11 have been the National Days of Mourning following the deaths of Presidents Reagan and Ford,… Read more