Toptal Blog

Dealing with concurrency in Android through imperative-style programming can be quite the hassle. RxJava, a library for reactive and functional style programming, allows concurrency constructs to be modeled in a reactive way in Android’s non-reactive world.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Christopher Arriola shows us how RxJava can be incrementally introduced to existing Android projects and leveraged to simplify concurrency.

When done well, emotional design increases engagement and can elicit an emotion that will deliver a positive response in users.

Many popular languages for web development have their ‘default’ framework, such as Ruby on Rails for Ruby, or Django for Python. However, PHP has no such single default and has multiple popular options to choose from.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Karim Sakhibgareev compares the two most popular PHP frameworks, Symfony and Laravel, explores their features, and establishes guidelines for how PHP developers should choose between them.

Ahead of Snap’s IPO, we take a look at whether the rumoured valuation makes sense, and find that whilst overall market concerns regarding DAU growth are justified, the market is likely under-valuing the company’s ARPU growth prospects. For us, Snap is a Buy.

Why use the same tired icon sets for every single project? Follow this guide to learn how to add visual depth and intrigue to your icons and make them unique to the product they represent.

Modern mobile application development requires a well thought-out plan for keeping user data in sync across various devices. This is a thorny problem with many gotchas and pitfalls, but users expect the feature and expect it to work well. For iOS and macOS, Apple provides a robust toolkit, called CloudKit API, which allows developers targeting Apple platforms to solve this synchronization problem.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Paul Young demonstrate how to use CloudKit to keep a user’s data in sync between multiple clients.

Automated software tests are critically important to the long-term quality, maintainability, and extensibility of software projects, and for Java, JUnit is the path to automation.

While most of this article will focus on writing robust unit tests and utilizing stubbing, mocking, and dependency injection, Toptal Software Engineer Josh Hayden will also discuss JUnit and integration tests.

Despite the large increase in resources aimed at helping founders navigate the fundraising process, many still struggle when it comes to comprehending certain term sheet clauses.

Such clauses can lead to founders losing control of their company or payout structures upon exit down the road. This post breaks down the term sheet’s trickiest clauses and the implications thereof.

For a while, WordPress seemed to had fallen behind. As the web became more reliant on JavaScript to create immersive, interactive experiences, it became increasingly clear that WordPress needed to offer new ways for users and developers to interact with its content.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Developer Brian Coords explores the amazing new features of WordPress’s REST API, showing why WordPress is still on the cutting edge of web development.