Toptal Blog

Exceptions are a fundamental element of modern programming—and nothing to fear. Implement these exception handling best practices to write clean code that is easier to maintain.

HSA is a set of standards and specifications designed to allow further integration of CPUs and GPUs on the same bus. This is not an entirely new concept, but HSA takes it to the next level. HSA would effectively take the developer out of the equation, at least when it comes to assigning different loads to different processing cores.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor and resident chip geek Nermin Hajdarbegovic takes a closer look at HSA and the future of heterogeneous computing in general. Get ready for some good news, but don’t forget to brace for bad news first.

Elixir, a dynamic, functional programming language, is designed for building scalable and maintainable applications with a simple, modern, and tidy syntax. Although it is easy to understand, Elixir’s approach to concurrency and its data type nuances require some getting used to.

In this article, Toptal engineer Kleber Virgilio Correia gives us a comprehensive guide to the various basic data types in that are available in Elixir.

When dealing with time consuming, resource intensive tasks, most PHP developers are tempted to choose the “quick hack route”. We’ve all used “ini_set(‘max_execution_time’, HUGE_INT);” before, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

In today’s tutorial, PHP developer Daniel Gheorghe demonstrates how an application’s user experience may be improved by separating long-running tasks from the main request flow using Laravel.

As software engineers, we’re always searching for the best tools and guides that will help us to be more productive while spending less time searching and reading long technical specifications.

Today, Toptal is pleased to present an entirely new resource to the community as a free download: a CSS Cheat Sheet. Toptal’s CSS Cheat Sheet is a quick CSS reference guide, and includes CSS syntax, the most important selectors, properties, sizes, and units, and other useful CSS details, all in a short, easily understandable format.

How does one secure a vast, distributed network of tech talent? There are three ways of doing this: the right way, the wrong way, and the Toptal way. Today, we will be discussing the latter, and unveiling our plans for a comprehensive overhaul of our onboarding and authentication procedures.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic will help you get acquainted with our brand new processes. Since all Toptalers will be required to use our new security platform, we encourage you to comment and contribute to our efforts.

Camera systems are very important in conveying the right atmosphere in video games. When developing games, even 2D ones, advanced cameras should be your tool of choice.

In this article, Toptal engineer Mihai Cozma shows us how to build a modular camera system for 2D platform games using some simple components in Unity that can be easily extended to 2.5D or even 3D games.

Ionic is extremely popular at the moment, and it has revolutionized the hybrid application industry in a way that nobody could have imagined. However, over time, the best practices and tooling for Ionic have not progressed in the same way. As a result, the number of pitfalls that developers need to look out for when working with Ionic is still high.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Julien Renaux outlines the most common mistakes that Ionic developers should know.

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.