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

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Ultimate Guide to the Processing Language Part II: Building a Simple Game

Processing makes prototyping visual apps a breeze. With its easy to use programming constructs and some mathematics, building a simple game is a lot easier than one may think.

In this article, Toptal engineer Oguz Gelal provides a step-by-step tutorial to building a game using Processing and porting it to the web.

19 minute readContinue Reading
Oguz Gelal

Oguz Gelal

Oguz is a software engineer and full-stack web developer. He has worked with a number of frameworks and tools, fron- and back-end.

Building a Rest API with the Bottle Framework

REST APIs have become a common way to establish an interface between web back-ends and front-ends, and between different web services. The simplicity of this kind of interface, and the ubiquitous support of the HTTP and HTTPS protocols across different networks and frameworks, makes it an easy choice when considering interoperability issues.

Bottle is a minimalist Python web framework. It is lightweight, fast, and easy to use, and is well-suited to building RESTful services. In this article, I’ll provide a walkthrough of how to build a RESTful API service using Bottle.

12 minute readContinue Reading
Leandro Lima

Leandro Lima

Leandro has 15+ years in IT/development. Working with Python since 2013, he loves building efficient and cost-effective systems.

Will Shoppers And Developers Adapt to Proximity Marketing In-Store?

Talking about proximity marketing will get you varying reactions, from concerns about privacy issues to the idea that your phone is going to spam you with annoying ads non-stop, but if you boil down the idea, there are some really compelling concepts here.

When you clear away all the buzzwords, what exactly is this shift we’re seeing? It’s the world customizing itself to you. The world is reacting to your presence, specific to you as an individual. Retailers and start-ups have taken notice, and the concepts of mobile location analytics and proximity marketing are emerging out of that.

12 minute readContinue Reading

Toptal Talent Network Experts

Cold War Tech: It’s Still Here, And Still Being Used

The long-term effect of the Cold War on science and technology is more profound than Nena’s 99 Luftbalons, or any Oliver Stone Vietnam flick.

If you are reading this, you’re already using Cold War technology; The Internet. That’s not all. A lot of tech and infrastructure we take for granted was developed, or at least conceived, during these tumultuous decades.

14 minute readContinue Reading
Nermin Hajdarbegovic

Nermin Hajdarbegovic

As a veteran tech writer, Nermin helped create online publications covering everything from the semiconductor industry to cryptocurrency.

Demystifying iOS 9 Spotlight Search for Developers

Spotlight search in Apple iOS 9, compared to earlier versions, has been made much more prominent and personal. With suggestions from Siri and integration opportunities for third-party apps, iPhone’s search functionality is no longer limited to the scope of Apple’s own apps. In this article, Toptal engineer Richard Forsythe explores some iOS SDK functionalities that allow apps to make content available to the user via Spotlight search.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Richard Forsythe

Richard Forsythe

Richard’s posseses in-depth experience in a multitude of roles covering development, product ownership, and QA engineering.

Single Responsibility Principle: A Recipe for Great Code

Maintainable code is something we all desire and there are no shortage of coding principles that promise it. It is not always apparent how tremendously useful these principles are during the early stages of development. Nonetheless, the effort put in to ensure these qualities certainly pay off as the project grows and development continues. In this article, Toptal engineer Adel Fayzrakhmanov discusses how the Single Responsibility Principle is one of the most important aspect in writing good maintainable code.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Adel Fayzrakhmanov

Adel Fayzrakhmanov

Adel (MCE) has 15+ years in software development, focused on web technology and quality architecture. PHP and .NET are his forté.

Hosting for Freelance Developers: PaaS, VPS, Cloud, and More

Whether you’re creating a virtual storefront, deploying an app, or simply doing some third-party testing and development, chances are you need some server muscle. The good news is that there is a lot to choose from. The hosting industry may not be loud or exciting, but it never sleeps; it’s a dog eat dog world, with cutthroat pricing, a lot of innovation behind the scenes, and cyclical hardware updates.

In this article, we take a look at hosting options for freelance software engineers: PaaS, Cloud, VPS, dedicated, and more.

11 minute readContinue Reading
Nermin Hajdarbegovic

Nermin Hajdarbegovic

As a veteran tech writer, Nermin helped create online publications covering everything from the semiconductor industry to cryptocurrency.

Building a Color-based Image Search Engine in Ruby

With modern image editing tools, we often take for granted the ability to extract or identify color on some part of any image. However, doing it programmatically is not exactly so straightforward. Camalian, a Ruby gem, changes that, making extracting and manipulating colors in an image as easy as possible. In this article, Toptal engineer Nazar Hussain provides some insight into how various color spaces work, introduces Camalian, and gives an overview of how to use it to build a color-based image search engine in Ruby.

7 minute readContinue Reading
Nazar Hussain

Nazar Hussain

Nazar has a background in all aspects of development, including initial design, programming, implementation, and user support.

What the Hell Is DevOps?

Using modern DevOps Tools like Chef, Docker, Ansible, Packer, Troposphere, Consul, Jenkins, SonarQube, AWS, etc., does not mean that you are applying DevOps principles. DevOps is a way of thinking.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Demir Selmanovic

Demir Selmanovic

Demir is a developer and project manager with over 15 years of professional experience in a wide range of software development roles.

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