Toptal Blog

The threaded model and global interpreter lock has always been in the way of Python handling thousands of concurrent long-lived connections. Modern web frameworks, such as Tornado, use non-blocking network I/O to make Python feasible for implementing WebSocket servers.

In this article, Toptal engineer Jongwook Kim walks us through the process of implementing a simple WebSocket-based web application in Python using the Tornado web framework.

Truly understanding design is easier said than done. Coding and aesthetic design require very different skill sets, which is why some front-end developers aren’t as proficient in design as they could be, and the quality of their work suffers for it.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Bryan Grezeszak explains why good front-end developers have to follow essential design principles down to the pixel, and should regularly seek out advice and feedback from their designers.

When dealing with data analysis, most companies rely on MS Excel or Google Sheets, but dealing with data presented this way isn’t very eye-catching or intuitive. It’s once you add visualizations to this data that things become a little easier to manage. That’s the topic of today’s tutorial by our guest author from Adobe, Rohit Boggarapu. Join us as he guides us though the process of making interactive drill-down charts using jQuery and FusionCharts.

In the rapidly evolving Internet world, getting things done fast is always critical. Still, developers today waste hundreds of hours on tasks not related to programming: setting up databases or caches, deploying projects, monitoring online statistics, and so on.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Minhao Zhang guides us in a step-by-step tutorial on how to reduce waste by setting up your first virtual machine using Amazon Web Services, and introduces the most widely used AWS services that can boost your productivity in minutes.

Writing code that is easily testable takes some effort and planning. However, some patterns exist that can be used to write simple and functional code, making it easier to test them when the time comes.

In this article, Toptal engineer Joshua Mock shares some useful tips and patterns for writing testable code in JavaScript that are both simple to understand and simple to implement.

Navigation in mobile applications, when done right, can have tremendous positive impact on overall user experience. Android offers application developers multiple ways of implementing navigation in their application. However, not all navigation patterns are created equal.

In this article, Toptal engineer Becze Szabolcs shows us how to implement fragment-based navigation and how it stacks up against Android’s traditional navigation philosophy.

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.

Database tuning can be an incredibly difficult task, particularly when working with large-scale data where even the most minor change can have a dramatic (positive or negative) impact on performance.

In mid-sized and large companies, most database tuning will be handled by a Database Administrator (DBA). But there are plenty of developers who have to perform DBA-like tasks; meanwhile, DBAs often struggle to work well with developers.

In this article, learn database tuning tips and how developers and DBAs can work together effectively.

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.