Toptal Blog

Promises are a hot topic in JavaScript, and you should definitely get acquainted with them. They are not easy to wrap your head around, it can take a few articles, and a decent amount of practice to comprehend them. Aim of this article is to help you understand Promises, and nudge you to get more practice using them.

Why are Rails Engines not used more often? I don’t know the answer, but I do think that the generalization of “Everything is an Engine” has hidden the problem domains that they can help to solve.

After 6 years of improving and working on Objective-C, Apple decided to throw another challenge at developers. Once again, iOS developers will need to learn a new programming language: Swift.

Swift 1.0 is already a stable and strong development platform, which is sure to evolve in interesting ways over the coming years. It is a perfect moment to start exploring this new language, as it is the future of iOS development.

One of the most capable, extensible and popular front-end frameworks is AngularJS, and one of the most useful components of the AngularJS framework is something called a directive. In this article, the four functions that execute as a directive is created and applied to the DOM will be explored.

How do we understand and interpret the huge amounts of data coming out of simulations? How do we visualize potential gigabytes of datapoints in a large dataset? In this article I will give a quick introduction to VTK and its pipeline architecture, and go on to discuss a real-life visualization example.

It’s been over 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau specified HTML, which became the standard markup language used to build the Internet.

HTML5 was supposed to finally solve our problems and become “one standard to rule them all (browsers)”. This was probably one of the most anticipated technologies since creation of the World Wide Web.

React.js is a fantastic library. It is only one part of a front-end application stack, however. It doesn’t have much to offer when it comes to managing data and state. Facebook, the makers of React, have offered some guidance there in the form of Flux. I’ll introduce basic Flux control flow, discuss what’s missing for Stores, and how to use Backbone Models and Collections to fill the gap in a “Flux-compliant” way.

Today we have thousands of digital and printed resources that provide step-by-step instructions about developing all kinds of different web applications. Development environments are “smart” enough to catch and fix many mistakes that early developers battled with regularly. There are even many different development platforms that easily turn simple static HTML pages into highly interactive applications.

All of these development patterns, practices, and platforms share common ground, and they are all prone to similar mistakes caused by the very nature of web applications.

Hoodie is a progressive new library for front-end developers that adopts some remarkable new philosophies. Hoodie puts the control over app design completely in the hands of the front-end developers and user-experience experts, and frees users from the bonds of un-interruptible connectivity.