Toptal Engineering Blog

To create a .NET project from scratch, simply using Visual Studio Wizard is good enough most of the time. However, the default project settings produced by wizards are hardly acceptable for professional teams, as they set too low of a bar on quality.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Andrei Smirnov guides us through several standard practices, configuration files, and project settings every developer should apply when starting a new .NET project. Doing this in the very beginning of a project decreases future technical debt and makes product source code readable and professional-looking.

If you haven’t been working with PHP lately, you might wonder what happened to PHP 6. Why the skip from PHP 5 to PHP 7? Well, long story short, PHP 6 was a failure. To avoid confusion, the new version was renamed PHP 7.

PHP 7 introduces a number of new features, while at the same time dropping depreciated SAPIs and extensions. As a result, it tends to outperform PHP 5.x by a wide margin. Some compatibility issues could pose a problem, but most developers have nothing to worry about.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vilson Duka explains what makes PHP 7 different, and why it’s time to make the switch.

Since its debut in 2008, Python 3 has come a long way. Gone are the days when it lacked support for almost all useful libraries and tools. Python 3 offers many improvements and amazing new features that make writing robust code in Python easier than ever.

In this article, Toptal engineer Dario Bertini discusses some of the improvements and features that Python 3 has to offer, and explains whether switching to Python 3 is a smart choice right now.

Meteor is a framework for rapidly building real-time JavaScript web applications. It can be used to build complex applications with amazing ease. However, that can often result in adoption of bad development practices and poorly structured code.

In this article, Toptal engineer Darion Cassel shares some simple ways to improve the structure of your next Meteor-based web application without resorting to complicated boilerplates and scaffolding tools.

Robot Operating System, a framework for building robot applications, allows developers to assemble a complex system by connecting existing solutions for small problems.

In this article, Toptal engineer Adnan Ademovic gives us a step-by-step tutorial to building software for an onboard computer that allows us to remotely control and monitor a robot and running it in a simulated world using Robot OS.

Small teams frequently have to compete with bigger, more structured organizations who are capable of allocating more resources to project management, and software release management in particular. This means that small teams, or even individual developers, need to properly organize and execute their release process in order to keep up.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Lucas Mancini focuses specifically on small startups, teams that don’t have, or can’t afford, DevOps support, or teams that don’t have a formal process defined for releasing new versions of their product. The author provides a suggested checklist method to manage releases, tailored to match his past experience working on different projects, together with some recommended best practices and guidelines.

The current trend in graphic design is to use a lot of rounded corners in all sorts of shapes. We can observe this on many web pages, mobile devices, and desktop applications, as rounded corners make the user interface feel smoother and nicer. However, what if we have to generate rounded corners on the fly, and we cannot preload it from an image?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Bojan Kverh guides us in a step-by-step tutorial on how to develop a simple class in C++ that can turn a complex polygon into a shape with rounded corners using Bezier curves and QPainter.

AWS Lambda offers a relatively thin service with a rich set of ancillary configuration options, making it possible to implement easily scalable and maintainable applications leveraging these services.

In this article, Toptal engineer Andrew Crosio gives us a step-by-step tutorial for building an image uploading and resizing service and demonstrates how AWS Lambda can be used as a platform to easily build service oriented architecture applications.

Modern web browsers offer a number of different APIs and mechanisms to storing data on the client-side. But are all of these options created equal?

In this article, Toptal engineer Stephen Villee demystifies the various client-side storage options available in modern web browsers and explains how each of these can play a role in storing session data on the client-side.

When a software developer hears news about a “new JavaScript framework” or a “new IDE,” he doesn’t need to ask more questions to clarify what it’s about. But if he hears about a “new agile framework,” he will likely do the Homer-Simpsonian nodding, pretending that he knows what it’s about, but he will have one, and only one, question: “What the heck does ‘agile framework’ mean?”

In the modern software development environment, we increasingly hear words like “agile,” “scrum,” and “kanban,” and they are often used improperly. In this article, I’ll try to explain and to clarify some of these terms.

There are a number of things which motivated me to start my current company. Breaking away from client work while retaining all the benefits of being a location independent freelancer was one of them.

We’re a team of 10 now, serving more than 1,500 businesses worldwide. We have an office in Berlin, but many of us work remotely. In this article, I’ll dig into to the principles, tools and lessons that have helped us along the way. After reading it, I hope you’ll be able to architect your software company so it’s remote-friendly right from the start.

With Microsoft’s no-brainer shift towards open source and interoperability it was only a matter of time before we started seeing alternatives to some of their key products, like Visual Studio. Enter Project Rider: the code name for IDE guru JetBrains’ competition to Visual Studio.

Here’s the lowdown on Project Rider, the newest member of the IntelliJ platform family.

The Art of War is an ancient military treatise, but despite its age, the text is still included in the syllabus at many military schools. Sun Tzu’s principles and teachings also have practical applications in politics, business, sports, and, believe it or not, software development. In fact, you might just be applying some of these principles in your daily routine, without even knowing.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jose F. Maldonado explains why many of these ancient teachings still matter, and what you can do to make them work for you and your team.

Unlike most front-end web frameworks, React’s aim is to solve the various challenges of building user interfaces that rely on changing data. Although React is a simple JavaScript library and is easy to get started with, it is still possible to misuse it in ways that deny the web app from reaping the benefits that React has to offer.

In this article, Toptal engineer Ivan Rogic demonstrates the synergy of React, Redux and Immutable.js, and shows how these libraries together can solve many performance issues that are often encountered in large web applications.

Python is a powerful, object-based, high-level programming language with dynamic typing and binding. Due to its flexibility and power, developers often employ certain rules, or Python design patterns. What makes them so important and what do does this mean for the average Python developer?

In this post, Toptal Senior Software Engineer Andrei Boyanov explains why Python is great for design patterns, and how they can be used to unlock even more potential, or to streamline development and make code more maintainable.

Today, a massive amount of data is available in the form of networks or graphs. For example, the World Wide Web, with its web pages and hyperlinks, social networks, semantic networks, biological networks, citation networks for scientific literature, and so on.

A tree is a special type of graph, and is naturally suited to represent many types of data. The analysis of trees is an important field in computer and data science. In this article, we will look at the analysis of the link structure in trees. In particular, we will focus on tree kernels, a method for comparing tree graphs to each other, allowing us to get quantifiable measurements of their similarities or differences. This an important process for many modern applications such as classification and data analysis.

Microservices are one of the latest trends in software design. In a microservices architecture, the classic monolithic back-end is substituted by a suite of distributed services. This design allows better separation of responsibilities, easier maintenance, greater flexibility in the choice of technologies for each service, and easier scalability and fault tolerance.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Francisco Temudo guides us in a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a microservices suite using Ruby.

Hackathons often inspire engineers to create amazing software. By blending various technologies together, really useful and often fun projects can be realized in a short period of time.

In this article, Toptal engineer Radek Ostrowski shares his experience participating in the IBM Sparkathon, and walks us through how he elegantly combined the power of Apache Spark and Docker in IBM Bluemix to build a weather app.

With approximately one billion people using Microsoft Office, the DOCX format is the most popular de facto standard for exchanging document files between offices.

While DOCX is a complex format, you may want to parse it manually for simpler tasks such as indexing, converting to TXT and making other small modifications. I’d like to give you enough information on DOCX internals so you don’t have to reference the ECMA specifications, a massive 5,000 page manual.

Boring. That’s a word many people use to describe the server industry, although unexciting and uneventful would be a better fit. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because when something “exciting” happens to a server, it usually involves blue smoke and downtime. Luckily, the server space is about to get a bit more exciting, thanks to the introduction of servers based on ARM processors.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor and resident chip geek Nermin Hajdarbegovic explains why ARM processors could end up powering a server near you, and what this means for the software industry. The potential implications of ARM servers are huge, but there is no cause for alarm. This industry segment does not tend to evolve fast, and developers will have plenty of time to get ready.

Machine Learning, in computing, is where art meets science. Perfecting a machine learning tool is a lot about understanding data and choosing the right algorithm. But why choose one algorithm when you can choose many and make them all work to achieve one thing: improved results.

In this article, Toptal Engineer Necati Demir walks us through some elegant techniques of ensemble methods where a combination of data splits and multiple algorithms is used to produce machine learning results with higher accuracy.