Toptal Blog

The Toptal Blog is the top hub for developers, designers, finance experts, executives, and entrepreneurs, featuring key technology updates, tutorials, freelancer resources, and management insights.

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Toptal core team members share their experience, expertise, and perspectives on the Toptal Edge Blog

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Build Sleek Rails Components With Plain Old Ruby Objects

Your website is gaining traction, and you are growing rapidly. Ruby/Rails is your programming language of choice. Your team is bigger and you’ve given up on “fat models, skinny controllers” as a design style for your Rails apps. However, you still don’t want to abandon using Rails? No problem.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Eqbal Quran explains how you can decouple and isolate your Rails components using nothing Plain Old Ruby Objects. Ruby objects and abstractions can decouple concerns, simplify testing, and help you produce clean, maintainable code.

18 minute readContinue Reading
Eqbal Quran

Eqbal Quran

Eqbal is a senior full-stack developer with more than a decade of experience working in web and mobile development.

Use Magento If You're Serious About eCommerce

You’ve heard that Magento is the eCommerce platform to use if you’re serious about your business – and you’re serious about your business – so you’ve decided on Magento. But do you know what you’re getting into?

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Andrew Hughes walks us through the difference between WordPress WooCommerce and Magento. While Magento is the expert’s eCommerce platform of choice, it’s not always the right solution, depending on your client.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Andrew Hughes

Andrew Hughes

Andrew has 15+ years in full-stack, integration, and mobile development. He also wrote a custom word processor, then two novels with it.

A Data Engineer’s Guide To Nontraditional Data Storages

With the rise of big data and data science, storage and retrieval have become a critical pipeline component for data use and analysis. Recently, new data storage technologies have emerged. But the question is: Which one should you choose? Which one is best suited for data engineering?

In this article, Toptal Data Scientist Ken Hu compares three prominent storage technologies within the context of data engineering.

7 minute readContinue Reading
Ken Hu

Ken Hu

Ken is a Python expert. He focuses on data and machine learning, microservices, data analytics, natural language processing, and AI.

An Introduction to Protocol-oriented Programming in Swift

Most modern programming languages, in the hopes of enhanced maintainability and reusability of code, offer some constructs that help the developer keep the definition of behavior and its implementation separate.

Swift takes the idea of interfaces a step further with protocols. With protocols and protocol extensions, Swift allows developers to enforce elaborate conformity rules without compromising the expressiveness of the language.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Alexander Gaidukov explores Swift protocols and how protocol-oriented programming can improve the maintainability and reusability of your code.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Aleksandr Gaidukov

Aleksandr Gaidukov

Alexander has 9+ of experience in developing applications and over 5+ with the iOS platform (iPhone and iPad).

The Zen of devRant

Let’s face it: Sometimes you just need to rant. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. It’s called devRant, and it’s the place for developers to vent about clients from hell, non-technical friends and family, and clueless recruiters.

In this roundup, devRant Co-Founder David Fox shares his favorite collection of rants since launching. Some will make you laugh. Others will make you laugh so hard you cry. And just about all of them will make you empathize with the author.

12 minute readContinue Reading
David Fox

David Fox

David is an experienced Web Developer and Big Data Engineer specializing in building big data solutions with graph databases and Hadoop.

To Designers With Love (A Letter From a Front-end Developer)

If you’re a veteran frontender, you’ve probably had some not-so-great experiences with designers, and chances are some designers have had an equally bad experience working with you. How can you make sure you get exactly what you need from your designer, without placing an undue burden on them?

It’s a tall order, but in this article Freelance Software Engineer Vedran Aberle Tokic outlines and addresses a number of potential issues that may become roadblocks for your execution. Implementing these suggestions may result in overhead for designers, but they can save enormous amounts of time and headache elsewhere.

11 minute readContinue Reading
Vedran Aberle Tokić

Vedran Aberle Tokić

With over two decades in full-stack development, Vedran’s a JavaScript veteran who loves to problem-solve user interfaces.

10 Tips for Effective Legacy Data Migration

Nobody wants to leave valuable customer data behind. Unfortunately, though, the hardest part of data migration to a complex CRM system, such as Salesforce, is the handling of legacy data.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Marian Paul provides 10 tips for successful legacy data migration to Salesforce.

13 minute readContinue Reading
Marian Paul

Marian Paul

Marian is a senior developer, expert in data migrations and back-end solutions. He has Oracle SQL and Microsoft SQL expert certifications.

How to Isolate Client-Server Interaction Logic in iOS Applications

Client-server interactions play a vital role in most modern mobile applications. By leveraging available back-end services, these mobile applications can provide some really amazing functionalities. However, as mobile applications grow complex, it becomes essential to keep the networking module as clean and maintainable as possible - separated from the rest of the application logic.

In this article, Toptal freelance software engineer Alexander Gaidukov walks us through the design of a simple networking module that allows your iOS application to interact with RESTful APIs.

11 minute readContinue Reading
Aleksandr Gaidukov

Aleksandr Gaidukov

Alexander has 9+ years of experience in developing applications and more than five years with the iOS platform (iPhone and iPad).

An HDFS Tutorial for Data Analysts Stuck with Relational Databases

The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a scalable, open-source solution for storing and processing large volumes of data. With its built-in replication and resilience to disk failures, HDFS is an ideal system for storing and processing data for analytics.

In this step-by-step tutorial, Toptal Database Developer Dallas H. Snider details how to migrate existing data from a PostgreSQL database into the more efficient HDFS.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Dallas H. Snider

Dallas H. Snider

Dallas has 22 years of database application development experience. He has worked with SQL servers & Oracle, in both Windows & Linux.

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