Engineering at Betterment

Meet Blazer: A New Open-Source Project from Betterment (video)

While we love the simplicity and flexibility of Backbone, we’ve recently encountered situations where the Backbone router didn’t perfectly fit the needs of our increasingly sophisticated application. To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router.

By Mike Reust
CTO, Betterment | Published: March 17, 2015

We love the simplicity and flexibility of Backbone, but it doesn't always fit all our needs.

We created an open-source extension—you can download it below.

All teams at Betterment are responsible for teasing apart complex financial concepts and then presenting them in a coherent manner, enabling our customers to make informed financial decisions. One of the tools we use to approach this challenge on the engineering team is a popular Javascript framework called Backbone.

While we love the simplicity and flexibility of Backbone, we’ve recently encountered situations where the Backbone router didn’t perfectly fit the needs of our increasingly sophisticated application.

To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. In the spirit of open-source software, we are sharing Blazer with the community. To learn more, we encourage you to watch the below video featuring Betterment’s Sam Moore, a lead engineer, who reveals the new framework at a Meetup in Betterment’s NYC offices.

Take a look at Blazer.

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