Soumyata and Mohi describe their use of Apache Spark framework to generate sophisticated risk analytics for millions of portfolios in minutes. They deep dive into Spark optimizations and share some tricks to increase the efficiency of Spark applications. — By: Soumyata Binani, Engineer I, & Mohi Mohi, Engineer I in Aladdin Wealth Tech Distributed Compute team, BlackRock Whether you’re a seasoned Spark aficionado or just embarking on your journey, delving into the nuances of Spark optimization can make a notable difference in the pace, effectiveness, and scalability of your…

Thomas describes some of the unique challenges that arise when building micro frontends in practice and the approach the Aladdin Portfolio Management Engineering team has used with contract testing to address those challenges. — By: Thomas Gualino, Lead Engineer in Aladdin Engineering, BlackRock If you’re familiar with the UI world, you have surely heard of micro-frontends, the new kid on the block when it comes to front-end development.

Alan Moore, Managing Director, Tech Fellow, and BlackRock ‘Boomerang,’ discusses his career at BlackRock, including a 5 year period where he left the firm and subsequently re-joined. By: Jillian Caffrey, Vice President, Global Head of Alumni Relations, BlackRock Alan Moore, Managing Director and Technical Fellow, is the lead Aladdin Architect…

Gary describes how his team is leveraging Nx features to reduce pipeline execution times for their monorepo. He deep dives into Nx distributed caching and the process through which he was able to make significant improvements to the team’s build and test times. — By: Gary Dexter, Lead Engineer in Aladdin Wealth Tech, BlackRock In a recent blog post, “Don’t get tangled in your code,” we spoke about how we use Nx to manage a monorepo containing a large number of applications and shared functionality across libraries, as well as some of the challenges…

The answer is pretty simple: Whatever you make of it. — By: Kyle Dowling, Vice President, Corporate Communications, BlackRock “ I was always a tinkerer — even as a child,” says Deval Patel, an engineer within Aladdin Engineering at BlackRock. In the beginning, that tinkering meant building his own games and programming robots. …

By: Michael Sternberg, Head of Aladdin Financial Engineering, BlackRock

Spenson deep dives into his recent open-source contribution where he was able to reduce memory footprint and speed up key calculations used for portfolio analytics in Aladdin Wealth — Spenson Shih, Lead Engineer in Aladdin Wealth The world is heavily reliant on open-source software, and BlackRock is no exception. I recall the days following the publication of Log4Shell — the zero-day vulnerability affecting Log4j logging framework, when open-source developers across the globe dedicated time and resources to address the…

Li shares his view on ‘healthy code review culture’. He describes the importance of providing high quality reviews, shares best practices, and encourages developers to look at the PR stats for their teams and evaluate the health of their team’s PR culture. — Li He, Senior Principal Engineer in Aladdin Wealth Pull Requests have long been accepted as a best practice around managing source code, with many benefits such as improving overall code quality, reducing bugs, and providing more transparency over the development life cycle. These code improvements can be measured in terms…

Growing BlackRock’s Tech Fellow program with new leadership — By: Lance Braunstein, Head of the Aladdin Product Group Technology not only serves as the foundation of BlackRock’s business but defines a significant part of how we work. …