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
Developing a Portfolio Backtester in R
As part of building our new Tax-Loss Harvesting (TLH) feature, we needed to build a portfolio backtester to simulate portfolio performance over a historical period. R was the obvious choice for its strength in statistics and finance; the R Finance community in particular has created a number of very useful packages, some of which we’ll talk… Read more
Building the Startup Compensation Visualization
We recently published a company blog post titled Manage Your Tech Career that featured a visualization of “Startup Salary & Equity Compensation” across different job functions, levels, company sizes and regions. The post received more traffic than we anticipated, and a lot of people have asked questions about the tool. Here I’d like to tell… Read more