Toptal Blog

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.

We increasingly hear “agile,” “scrum,” and “kanban” used improperly in today’s software development environment. This article will clarify how and when to use them for successful project outcomes.