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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Electron: Cross-platform Desktop Apps Made Easy

Building cross-platform desktop applications has been something of a nightmare for a very long time, as extreme differences between popular desktop operating systems makes it a challenging feat. However, in light of newer tools and frameworks like Electron, building a cross-platform desktop application has never been easier. In this article, Toptal engineer Stéphane P. Péricat walks us through a step-by-step tutorial to building a cross-platform password key-ring desktop application using technologies that most of us are already familiar with.

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Stéphane P. Péricat

Stéphane P. Péricat

Stéphane is a front-end engineer with 7+ years’ of experience. He specializes in building performant JavaScript-based web applications.

Open Source: It’s Not That Scary!

Is open source scary? Do developers think that nobody would be interested in their personal projects? What are the fears associated with publishing your own work for the public to see? In this article, Toptal Director of Engineering Anna Chiara Bellini shares how, as an accomplished engineer, she made her first contribution to GitHub. This guide features all the step-by-step basics to getting involved in open source, including everything from what open source software is, to how to start working with Git and GitHub, to actually making meaningful contributions to open source projects.

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Anna-Chiara Bellini

Anna-Chiara Bellini

When Anna started coding at a young age. Since then, her career has spanned many different projects and programming technologies.

What Is Bootstrap? Effortless Responsive Sites With Bootstrap Web Development

You’ve heard of Bootstrap, but what is Bootstrap, exactly? A powerful collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tools, it makes responsive web development easy. Get started with the basics of Bootstrap.

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Tomislav Bacinger

Tomislav Bacinger

Tomislav (MSc) has spent more than 15 years in full-stack development and data analysis, but geospatial visualizations are his favorite.

One of the most misused, misunderstood, and neglected of all the Rails built-in structures is the view helper. Helpers often get a bad reputation for being a dumping ground for one-off methods used across the entire application’s view layer. But what if your helpers could be more semantic, better organized, and even reusable across projects? What if they could be more than just one-off functions sprinkled throughout the view, but powerful methods that generated complex markup with ease leaving your views free of conditional logic and code?

Let’s see how to do this when building an image carousel, with the familiar Twitter Bootstrap framework and some good old-fashioned object-oriented programming.

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Carlos Ramirez III

Carlos Ramirez III

Carlos is a professional software engineer specializing in the Ruby on Rails framework. He has worked with US tech companies for years.

Building REST API for Legacy PHP Projects

Every once in a while PHP developers are charged with tasks that require them to extend the functionalities of legacy projects, a task that often includes building REST APIs. Building a REST API for PHP-based projects is challenging, but in the absence of proper frameworks and tools, it can also be a particularly difficult goal to get right. In this article, Toptal engineer Arminas Zukauskas shares his advice, with sample code, on how to build a modern structured REST API around existing legacy PHP projects.

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Arminas Zukauskas

Arminas Zukauskas

Arminas uses IT skills making business efficient. Worked on Toptal Core. His expertise includes NodeJS, PHP, MySQL and analytical thinking.

Hunting and Analyzing High CPU Usage in .NET Applications

Software performance in production is hard to analyze. Things can go wrong at any time, and code can start executing in ways that weren’t planned for. In these cases, what do we do? In this article, Toptal engineer Juan Pablo Scida analyzes a real scenario of high CPU usage of a web application. He covers all the processes and .NET code analysis involved to identify the problem, explains how the problem was solved, and most importantly, explores why this problem happened in the first place.

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Juan Pablo Scida

Juan Pablo Scida

Juan is a software architect with more than 10 years of experience. He is a certified .NET and Java developer, and loves Node.js and Erlang.

Optimized Successive Mean Quantization Transform

Image processing algorithms are often very resource intensive due to fact that they process pixels on an image one at a time and often requires multiple passes. Successive Mean Quantization Transform (SMQT) is one such resource intensive algorithm that can process images taken in low-light conditions and reveal details from dark regions of the image.

In this article, Toptal engineer Daniel Angel Munoz Trejo gives us some insight into how the SMQT algorithm works and walks us through a clever optimization technique to make the algorithm a viable option for handheld devices.

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Daniel Munoz

Daniel Munoz

Daniel has created high-performance applications in C++ for large companies such as Dreamworks. He also excels with C and ASM (x86).

Skype Tips for Remote Teams

Toptal has a strong remote culture), to say the least. To keep up with each other, we need a tool to keep team members in sync, where we can reach any other person at a moment’s notice. We use Skype as our main communication channel among Toptal’s core team.

Over the years, Skype has grown a lot, and has become a versatile tool that can be used on all of your devices at once, syncing chat amongst them, and providing a simple way to call and share screens. It is a tool that we leverage every day for our internal operations.

As heavy Skype users, there are a few things we’ve noticed that might not be clear to everyone. Here are a few tips on how you and your remote team can get the most of of Skype.

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Alvaro Oliveira

Alvaro Oliveira

Alvaro is great at matching technologies and people to projects. At Toptal, he successful matched thousands of developers with clients.

Learn to Code: Wisdom and Tools for the Journey

It’s no surprise that more and more people, from all kinds of backgrounds, are deciding to learn to code. But, each person who tackles the task is soon faced with an unpleasant reality: Learning to program is hard. Contrary to expectations, the feeling of “I don’t get it,” may persist unabated long into the journey, making once bright-eyed beginners feel hopeless, lost, and ready to give up.

The moral of the story is this: Be prepared. The path to programmer paradise is a long one, and without the right mindset at the beginning, it can quickly lose its appeal. In this article, I’ll attempt to give you some guidance on what to expect on your journey, how best to go about it, and what tools and resources you may find helpful along the way.

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Nick McCrea

Nick McCrea

Nicholas is a professional software engineer with a passion for quality craftsmanship. He loves architecting and writing top-notch code.

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