Toptal Blog

Deploying instances of a web application to one or more servers manually can often be a monotonous process, and take up a significant amount of your time. With little effort, it is possible to automate the process of deploying your web application with almost zero human intervention. This article outlines a simple approach to automating web application deployments using GitHub webhooks, buildpacks, and Procfiles.

In Part I of this three-part series, we saw how the free motion of rigid bodies can be simulated. In Part II, we saw how to make bodies aware of each other through collision and proximity tests. Up to this point, however, we still have not seen how to make objects truly interact with each other. The final step to simulating realistic, solid objects, is to apply constraints, defining restrictions on the motion of rigid bodies.

In this article, we’ll discuss equality constraints and inequality constraints. We’ll describe them first in terms of a force-based approach, where corrective forces are computed, and then in terms of an impulse-based approach, where corrective velocities are computed instead. Finally, we’ll go over some clever tricks to eliminate unnecessary work and speed up computation.

Analysts have come to recognize social network data as a virtual treasure trove of information for sensing public opinion trends and groundswells of support. In this article, Toptal Engineer Elder Santos describes the techniques he employed for a proof-of-concept that effectively analyzed Twitter Trend Topics to predict, as a sample test case, regional voting patterns in the 2014 Brazilian presidential election.

Most of us work from home offices, so we use cheaper household electricity and enjoy better prices than businesses in many parts of the world. Since we don’t commute or drive to work each morning, we already save a bit of money and reduce our carbon footprint. However, there is always room for improvement.

Any time you’re physically out of the office or working with someone who isn’t next to you, you’re working remotely. At Toptal, working remotely is a productive and efficient reality that we evangelize to our clients, while practicing what we preach.

In this article, Toptal COO Breanden Beneschott shares great tactics in operating highly collaborative remote teams.

Backbone.js equips the developer with an array of tools that are minimal but extremely flexible. This gives developers the option to design the applications the way they want, but also introduces a number of way things can go wrong. This article outlines a few common mistakes that Backbone.js developers can make, and how they may avoid them.

Log files may very well be one of the most underestimated and underutilized tools at a developer’s disposal. Beyond their value for debugging, with a bit of creativity and forethought, logs files can be leveraged to serve as a valuable source of usage information and analytics. In this article, In this article, Toptal engineer Ilya Sanosyan provides a practical guide to maximizing the value we get from our logs.

Windows 10 represents a departure from Microsoft’s traditional OS strategy. It’s not just a new operating system, it’s an automatic and free update for millions of Windows 8.1 devices. It’s also designed to address a number of user complaints related to the Windows 8.x UI. The changes aren’t just skin deep, as Windows 10 is not a mere redesign with a new UI and fancier apps; it might even mark the start of a new era for Microsoft, and in this post I will explain why.

AngularJS is a very powerful framework. It is the third most starred repository on GitHub. It is not difficult to start using, but the goals that it is intended to accomplish demand comprehension. No longer can we ignore memory consumption, because it will not reset on navigation anymore. This is the vanguard of web development. Let’s embrace it!