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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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Boost Your Data Munging With R

As a language, R is strongly tied to data and is thus used mostly by statisticians and data scientists. Many who already use R for machine learning, though, are not aware that data munging can be done faster in R, meaning another tool is not required for that task.

In this article, Freelance Software Engineer Jan Gorecki explores tabular data transformations and introduces us to one of the fastest open-source data wrangling tools available.

17 minute readContinue Reading
Jan Gorecki

Jan Gorecki

Jan is a business intelligence and data warehousing expert with advanced R skills and some infrastructure experience.

Get Your Angular 2 On: Upgrading from 1.5

“So much of what’s new and exciting about Angular 2 is its new way of thinking rather than its new architecture,” says Toptal Freelance Developer Ethan James.

In this article, Ethan walks through the inner workings of a simple Angular 1.5 app and then shows us how to upgrade it to Angular 2 while giving us the necessary understanding to truly appreciate it.

11 minute readContinue Reading
Ethan James

Ethan James

Ethan is a passionate Javascript developer who writes clean, semantic HTML5 and CSS3 and is as responsive as the sites he builds.

Web Audio API: Why Compose When You Can Code?

Meet Web Audio API, a powerful programming interface for controlling audio on the web. Gone are the days when the web browser could rarely play a sound file correctly. With this API, you can now load sound from different sources, apply effects, create visualizations, and do much more.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Joaquín Aldunate shows us how to unleash our inner musician using Web Audio API with the Tone.js framework by giving us a brief overview of what this API has to offer and how it can be used to manipulate audio on the web.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Joaquín Aldunate

Joaquín Aldunate

With a degree in industrial design, Joaquín has a rare versatility: He can make the web UI for a product but also invent the product itself.

Bidirectional Relationship Support in JSON

Ever tried to create a JSON data structure that includes entities with bidirectional relationships? If you have, you know that this often results in errors or exceptions being thrown.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Nirmel Murtic provides a robust working approach to avoiding these errors when creating JSON structures that included entities with bidirectional (i.e., circular) relationships.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Nirmel Murtic

Nirmel Murtic

Nirmel is a software engineer with more than eight years of professional experience. He excels as a solo developer but has lead experience, too.

Produce DWGs Like It's 2016: Teigha For Architecture

Today, the notion of repetitively modeling or drawing the windows, doors, and walls of standardized buildings seems archaic, so why do it? If you want to handle DWG files and ACA objects programmatically, one of the best platform options is Teigha Architecture.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Designer Alexey Abramovsky walks us through the DWG production of a small house to introduce us to the benefits of Teigha. Go from foundations to full render in this quick tutorial.

21 minute readContinue Reading
Aleksey Abramovsky

Aleksey Abramovsky

Aleksey is a lead C++ software developer with 13 years of experience building efficient and reliable code and long-term project maintenance.

Write Code to Rewrite Your Code: jscodeshift

How many times have you used the find-and-replace functionality (or RegEx) across a directory to make changes to JavaScript source files? Up your refactoring game by using codemods, scripts used to rewrite other scripts.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Jeremy Greer walks us through three common uses of codemods, using the toolkit “jscodeshift.”

15 minute readContinue Reading
Jeremy Greer

Jeremy Greer

Jeremy is a senior software engineer with a passion for modern JavaScript—client & server-side—including React, Redux, Angular, and Express.

Get Your Hands Dirty With Scala JVM Bytecode

The Scala language has continued to gain popularity over the last several years, thanks to its excellent combination of functional and object-oriented software development principles, and its implementation on top of the proven Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Creating a language that compiles to Java bytecode requires a deep understanding of the inner workings of the Java Virtual Machine. To appreciate what Scala’s developers have accomplished, it is necessary to go under the hood, and explore how Scala’s source code is interpreted by the compiler to produce efficient and effective JVM bytecode.

21 minute readContinue Reading
Sergey Reznick

Sergey Reznick

Sergey is an experienced software developer with a background in computer science and basic algorithms and over 20 years of experience.

The Rise Of Automated Trading: Machines Trading the S&P 500

More than 60 percent of trading activities with different assets rely on automated trading and machine learning instead of human traders. Today, specialized programs based on particular algorithms and learned patterns automatically buy and sell assets in various markets, with a goal to achieve a positive return in the long run.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Data Scientist Andrea Nalon explains how to predict, using machine learning and Python, which trade should be made next on the S&P 500 to get a positive gain.

24 minute readContinue Reading
Andrea Nalon

Andrea Nalon

With an MCE and extensive ML and quantitative analysis training, Andrea’s a data science experience covers R, Python, VBA, Excel, and SQL.

Sass Mixins: Keep Your Stylesheets DRY

Nowadays, front-end development workflows involve many modern tools and preprocessors that not only streamline the whole process, but also allow you to spend less time on common web tasks, giving you more time to focus on other aspects of the project that require more careful and skilled insight. Sass, the scripting language for syntactically awesome stylesheets, comes with robust and built-in support for mixins - an essential feature for keeping your stylesheets DRY.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Justin Brazeau shows us 10 useful Sass mixins that help keep your stylesheets manageable by breaking them into smaller reusable bits, each with its own focus.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Justin Brazeau

Justin Brazeau

Justin is a front-end website developer with a background in graphic design. He focuses on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WordPress.

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