How Wealthsimple uses GitHub
Wealthsimple is a Toronto-based financial services company offering automated investing, commission-free stock trading, cryptocurrency investment, cash, and tax services. With more than 100 developers on staff, the company uses GitHub to empower engineers to work quickly and safely while managing the complexity of scaling operations.
Company Overview
Location: Toronto, Canada
Industry: Financial Services
Developer Seats: 430
Upgrading to GitHub Enterprise
Wealthsimple has used GitHub since launching in 2014. In summer 2021, during a hiring surge, they upgraded from GitHub Team to GitHub Enterprise, initially motivated by compliance needs. "We're working towards SOC 2 compliance and from a regulatory perspective, we need a certain level of control over authentication," says Senior Engineering Manager Scott Barr. "So we upgraded to GitHub Enterprise initially for the SAML support."
The upgrade opened new possibilities. With GitHub Actions and other features like GitHub's GraphQL API, Wealthsimple could automate tedious processes and consolidate tools.
Automating Access and Onboarding
Employee onboarding and offboarding used to be manual processes prone to error. Getting necessary permissions required back-and-forth between teams and impacted productivity. "If a developer doesn't have access to all the resources they need, that can be a blocker for them," Barr explains. "Going back and fixing permissions later is a pain for IT. These issues create toil for everyone."
By moving to SAML, Wealthsimple automated access controls to ensure developers have access to the repositories they need.
Migrating to GitHub Actions
Once GitHub Actions became available, migrating from their previous CI provider was straightforward. "Actions is more fairly priced than our old solution," says Director of IT and Platform Engineering Brandon Eady. "It feels like GitHub wants to be a partner as we grow, rather than take advantage of us as we grow."
The product itself delivered better results. "With our old solution, we'd end up with dozens of engineers queued up and waiting for builds," Barr says. "That slowed the engineering organization down, and we knew it would only get worse as the company continues to grow. We needed something that would scale with the company."
Wealthsimple now sees significantly faster build times. For their site with lots of videos and cached assets, build time dropped from 11–12 minutes to four minutes.
Benefits of GitHub Actions
Resilience and simplicity: Fewer tools in the pipeline means fewer points of failure that could block work. Engineers spend less time managing tools and more time writing code.
Developer accessibility: The ability to create Actions in TypeScript enabled front-end engineers to contribute to process improvements. "Our front-end engineers are now able to improve our overall processes because they're more comfortable and confident in contributing," Barr says. "That's already leading to a big improvement to our front-end build system."
Marketplace ecosystem: Wealthsimple uses setup Actions such as Setup Python and Setup Node, along with Amazon Web Services Actions. "These are a core part of our build process," Barr notes. New Actions are added to the Marketplace regularly, providing more features to boost engineer productivity.
Enhanced Security
GitHub Actions improved security in multiple ways. Fewer third-party tools means fewer places to share security tokens and secrets. Wealthsimple also created a custom Action that blocks developers from merging code until known security CVEs are addressed, encouraging rapid remediation.
Using GitHub's GraphQL API, Wealthsimple generates reports on code hygiene and security status. "Six months ago we had around 60 outstanding security CVEs. Today, we have zero," Barr says.
"We're in a much more secure posture now," Eady agrees. "Automation leads to better processes. And better processes lead to better quality."