Toptal Blog

In this article I’ll relate my experience with the popular Unity game development platform and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern for game development. In my seven years of development, having wrestled with my fair share of game dev spaghetti, I’ve been achieving great code structure and development speed using this design pattern.

Some people like the known and predictable. They freak out when their daily routine gets disrupted. But, I’ll bet if you are doing any kind of creative work like programming or design, you are not one of those people. Ordinary day-to-day office work will kill you. It will eventually strip your motivation, creativity or flare for what you do.

A large number of modern mobile applications interact with web services in one way or another, and iOS applications are no different. Mantle (a model framework) and Realm (a mobile database) come with the promise of simplifying some of the hurdles in consuming web services through RESTful APIs and persisting data locally. In this article, Toptal engineer Marcin Kmiec shows how to build a simple iOS application using Mantle and Realm and demonstrates how this approach helps to eliminate a large amount of boilerplate code.

Even if you have a brand new notebook and a flagship smartphone, you should not rely on stock hardware for professional voice calls. It’s simply not good enough; otherwise there would be no aftermarket audio industry to begin with.

OpenGL, a cross-platform API for rendering 2D and 3D graphics, is extremely powerful and yet surprisingly easy to get started with. Although one may find the most common applications of OpenGL and rendered graphics in video games only, in reality there are far more uses. To demonstrate the power of OpenGL, we’ll be building a Mandelbrot set generator on Android using OpenGL ES.

Despite the prevalence of higher-level languages, the C programming language continues to empower the world. There are plenty of reasons to believe that C programming will remain active for a long time. Here are some reasons that C is unbeatable, and almost mandatory, for certain applications.

Google’s new cloud code platform does not appear to be taking on GitHub head on. Instead, Cloud Source Repositories (CSR) will allow users to connect to repositories hosted on GitHub or Bitbucket. However, everything is automatically synced to the Google Cloud Source Repository.

The good news is that a Google CSR can be connected to another Git repository hosted on GitHub or Bitbucket. All changes will be synchronised on both platforms, as you can set Google CSR to automatically mirror from GitHub and Bitbucket.

It is not uncommon for developers to find themselves in need of a UI component that is either not provided by the platform they are targeting or is, indeed, provided, but lacks a certain property or behavior. The answer to both scenarios is a custom UI component. The Android UI model is inherently customizable, offering the means to create custom UI components in various ways.

Mastering CSS is an absolute necessity for any solid web designer or developer. This tutorial walks you through the fundamentals of CSS layout principles, from classic CSS2 techniques to the latest approaches in CSS3. Learn more about how to leverage all that CSS has to offer in order to optimize both the user’s experience and the quality of your code.