Building Tools for Traders with Ian Henry

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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