Toptal Blog

There are a number of things which motivated me to start my current company. Breaking away from client work while retaining all the benefits of being a location independent freelancer was one of them.

We’re a team of 10 now, serving more than 1,500 businesses worldwide. We have an office in Berlin, but many of us work remotely. In this article, I’ll dig into to the principles, tools and lessons that have helped us along the way. After reading it, I hope you’ll be able to architect your software company so it’s remote-friendly right from the start.

With Microsoft’s no-brainer shift towards open source and interoperability it was only a matter of time before we started seeing alternatives to some of their key products, like Visual Studio. Enter Project Rider: the code name for IDE guru JetBrains’ competition to Visual Studio.

Here’s the lowdown on Project Rider, the newest member of the IntelliJ platform family.

The Art of War is an ancient military treatise, but despite its age, the text is still included in the syllabus at many military schools. Sun Tzu’s principles and teachings also have practical applications in politics, business, sports, and, believe it or not, software development. In fact, you might just be applying some of these principles in your daily routine, without even knowing.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jose F. Maldonado explains why many of these ancient teachings still matter, and what you can do to make them work for you and your team.

Unlike most front-end web frameworks, React’s aim is to solve the various challenges of building user interfaces that rely on changing data. Although React is a simple JavaScript library and is easy to get started with, it is still possible to misuse it in ways that deny the web app from reaping the benefits that React has to offer.

In this article, Toptal engineer Ivan Rogic demonstrates the synergy of React, Redux and Immutable.js, and shows how these libraries together can solve many performance issues that are often encountered in large web applications.

Python is a powerful, object-based, high-level programming language with dynamic typing and binding. Due to its flexibility and power, developers often employ certain rules, or Python design patterns. What makes them so important and what do does this mean for the average Python developer?

In this post, Toptal Senior Software Engineer Andrei Boyanov explains why Python is great for design patterns, and how they can be used to unlock even more potential, or to streamline development and make code more maintainable.

Today, a massive amount of data is available in the form of networks or graphs. For example, the World Wide Web, with its web pages and hyperlinks, social networks, semantic networks, biological networks, citation networks for scientific literature, and so on.

A tree is a special type of graph, and is naturally suited to represent many types of data. The analysis of trees is an important field in computer and data science. In this article, we will look at the analysis of the link structure in trees. In particular, we will focus on tree kernels, a method for comparing tree graphs to each other, allowing us to get quantifiable measurements of their similarities or differences. This an important process for many modern applications such as classification and data analysis.

Microservices are one of the latest trends in software design. In a microservices architecture, the classic monolithic back-end is substituted by a suite of distributed services. This design allows better separation of responsibilities, easier maintenance, greater flexibility in the choice of technologies for each service, and easier scalability and fault tolerance.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Francisco Temudo guides us in a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a microservices suite using Ruby.

Hackathons often inspire engineers to create amazing software. By blending various technologies together, really useful and often fun projects can be realized in a short period of time.

In this article, Toptal engineer Radek Ostrowski shares his experience participating in the IBM Sparkathon, and walks us through how he elegantly combined the power of Apache Spark and Docker in IBM Bluemix to build a weather app.

With approximately one billion people using Microsoft Office, the DOCX format is the most popular de facto standard for exchanging document files between offices.

While DOCX is a complex format, you may want to parse it manually for simpler tasks such as indexing, converting to TXT and making other small modifications. I’d like to give you enough information on DOCX internals so you don’t have to reference the ECMA specifications, a massive 5,000 page manual.