Toptal Blog

For some people, front-end design and development can sometimes start to seem like a chore, and can be monotonous and time consuming. Through a modular design approach, it is possible to both save time and streamline the design and development process.

To retain its users, any application or website must run fast. For mission critical environments, a couple of milliseconds delay in getting information might create big problems. As database sizes grow day by day, we need to fetch data as fast as possible, and write the data back into the database as fast as possible. To make sure all operations are executing smoothly, we have to tune Microsoft SQL Server for performance.

In this article, I’ll go through some of the interesting features and libraries that are available to use with React. Even if you don’t plan on using React, taking a look at its ecosystem is inspiring. You may want to simplify your build system using the powerful, yet comparatively easy to configure, module bundler Webpack, or start writing ECMAScript 6 and even ECMAScript 7 today with the Babel compiler. So, let’s explore the React ecosystem!

Programming is about having fun and enjoying the process of creating something cool. That is why we decided to build a bot-vs-bot game platform around Battleship and make it open source. In this article, we take a look at the code and mechanics of the extensible engine behind this platform.

In this article, I will show that unit testing itself is quite easy; the real problems that complicate unit testing, and introduce expensive complexity, are a result of poorly-designed, untestable code. We will discuss what makes code hard to test, which anti-patterns and bad practices we should avoid to improve testability, and what other benefits we can achieve by writing testable code. We will see that writing testable code is not just about making testing less troublesome, but about making the code itself more robust, and easier to maintain.

Simply calling something agile isn’t particularly helpful. The word, even in a software context, means different things to different people or organizations. There are many facets, definitions, implementations, and interpretations.

This introduction to Agile project management discusses the behaviors, frameworks, techniques, and concepts supporting Agile approaches to software development.

While Ruby has Rails and Python has Django, the dominant application development framework for Node has yet to be established. But, there is a powerful contender gaining steam: LoopBack, an open source API framework built by StrongLoop, the creators of Express.

Let’s take a closer look at LoopBack and it’s capabilities by turning everything into practice and building an example application.

Remote work comes with lots of things to take into account when designing your schedule, so finding the right balance that works best for you can be tricky. Here’s how to create a remote working schedule that works best for you, enabling you to get the most out of life while staying productive and effectively supporting your colleagues.

Ember.js is a comprehensive framework for building complex client-side applications. But, as with any advanced framework, there are still pitfalls Ember developers may fall into. With the following post, I hope to provide a map to evade these. Let’s jump right in!!