Engineering Blog – Wealthfront

Factory > Fixtures

In general, using fixtures in testing is a big no no. Not only does it become a maintenance nightmare, it can also significantly slow down your test suite. Instead, the general practice should be to build out factories. I personally like using machinist for its terse syntax, but because our front end stack relies on…

Expressive Java & Fluent Interfaces

In this article I briefly explore Wealthfront’s extensive usage of expressive and fluent interfaces in Java such as Kawala, Guice, Mockito, and Guava. To the uninitiated, Java invokes parables of moronic XML, obtuse syntax, and Nile-like constructor calls. As a result, Java’s status as a living language is often questioned and it’s “uncoolness” is dogmatically… Read more

Using Monadic Rainbow Tables for Eventually Consistent Higher-Order Types

Just kidding. David made us Gin Fizz’s and Whiskey Sours at last night’s poker game. Delicious.

IRC bots for Laziness, Impatience, and Continuous Deployment

1988 was an epic year. Not only were the movies “Die Hard”, “Coming to America” and “The Naked Gun” released, but according to Wikipedia, IRC was invented. A tried-and-true technology, constantly reincarnated in similar (perhaps inferior?) forms, IRC is a superb communications hub for a company because it affords so many things: Everyone can chat… Read more

Trust, but Remind

Every engineering organization faces the problem of how to ensure that things are done right. At Wealthfront, our appoach is a safety net of extremely thorough automated testing that guides the engineer to do the right thing. Automation is consistent. It doesn’t skip a code review because we’re in a hurry. It doesn’t fail to… Read more

When Canvas doesn’t cut it: Raphael.js

This is a guest post by Benjamin van der Veen who worked with us to develop a fabulous charting library leveraging vector graphics. Ben is a software consultant specializing in interaction design and development with a focus on iOS, as well as web server and REST web service design. He lives in rainy Portland, Oregon,… Read more