
Building Tools for Traders with Ian Henry
From Signals and Threads by Jane Street
May 28, 2025 · 1h 20m · Episode 23
About this episode
Ian Henry discusses his transition from consumer app development to creating high-performance tools for traders at Jane Street.
Ian Henry started his career at Warby Parker and Trello, building consumer apps for millions of users. Now he writes high-performance tools for a small set of experts on Jane Street’s options desk. In this episode, Ron and Ian explore what it’s like writing code at a company that has been “on its own parallel universe software adventure for the last twenty years.” Along the way, they go on a tour of Ian’s whimsical and sophisticated side projects—like Bauble, a playground for rendering trippy 3D shapes using signed distance functions—that have gone on to inform his work: writing typesafe frontend code for users who measure time in microseconds and prefer their UIs to be “six pixels high.”
People in this episode
Host: Ron
Guest: Ian Henry
Topics covered
- trading tools
- software development
- high-performance coding
- options trading
- frontend development
Keywords
- traders
- software
- high-performance
- frontend
- options desk
- 3D shapes
- typesafe
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Warby Parker, Trello, Jane Street
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