Toptal Blog

Location-based applications on our mobile devices have changed the way we interact with mobile technology. The list of these applications is extensive and has had a major impact on our lives.

This article walks us through a step-by-step tutorial of how to determine the location of an Android device using Google Location Services API.

The extremely diverse and fragmented Android ecosystem poses certain challenges when it comes to testing. In this article, we take a look at some approaches that can be effective with tackling these challenges and ease the process of writing and automating tests.

Passwordless authentication has been the Holy Grail of security for years, but progress has been painfully slow. Until a few years ago, the technology to implement passwordless logins on a grand scale simply wasn’t available.

However, the industry juggernaut is slowly but surely changing this. There are a few technical, legal and even ethical considerations to take into account, but be as it may, biometric, passwordless authentication is here to stay.

The nomadic lifestyle is not a vacation. There remains an impermeable barrier between the work world within the computer, and the real world outside of it. Yet there is so much intellectual stimulation and inspiration to be found on the road, it’s a genuine shame that we can’t build on it in the work we do, and with those we find around us. Making that dream a reality is the goal of Casey Rosengren and Alexey Komissarouk, founders of Hacker Paradise.

Toptal has taken its place as one of the strategic partners in Facebook’s effort to connect the world. Our vision of a distributed and office-less company with developers spread all over the globe has proven to be an amazing match to Facebook’s attempts to connect people worldwide.

Face it, you’re a software engineer, not a graphic designer. When you need to write a manual, technical document, or report, you just want to write it and be done with it. Especially for you as a software engineer – who is not put off by needing to learn and use some basic syntax conventions – Markdown can be the path of least resistance between what you want to write and getting it written.

Node.js, the cross-platform runtime environment, has seen its fair share of praise and criticism for what it offers to developers. Often, reasons for such criticisms are rooted in how developers use/misuse the language.

This article explores ten common mistakes that Node.js developers make and how to avoid them.

Meteor makes developing web applications simple. It’s easy to learn, and comes with a pre-built arsenal of powerful functionalities. In this article, we will walk through a detailed tutorial for building a simple real-time web application.

In this post, Toptal engineer Radek Ostrowski introduces Apache Spark—fast, easy-to-use, and flexible big data processing. Billed as offering “lightning fast cluster computing”, the Spark technology stack incorporates a comprehensive set of capabilities, including SparkSQL, Spark Streaming, MLlib (for machine learning), and GraphX. Spark may very well be the “child prodigy of big data,” rapidly gaining a dominant position in the complex world of big data processing.