Toptal Blog

Web services and their APIs abound. Unfortunately, the vast majority are difficult to use. Reasons range from poor design, to lack of documentation, to volatility, to unresolved bugs, or in some cases, all of the above.

Follow the guidance in this post to help ensure that your web API is clean, well-documented, and easy-to-use. Such APIs are truly rare and are therefore much more likely to be widely adopted and used.

Rails is both easy to use—and also to misuse. Let’s look at 10 common Rails programming mistakes, explore their consequences, and discover ways to steer clear, as we write clean Ruby on Rails code.

Don’t wait for a data breach to happen before making security a priority. This article explains how to set up a proactive web app defense and avoid the top 10 most common security pitfalls.

It’s astounding how few business owners properly account for the real cost of their labor. This article presents tried and true methods—including an online calculator—for calculating the real cost of your employees and consultants, enabling you to perform a sound financial analysis when faced with the “employee versus consultant” dilemma.

In this follow-up to his first highly popular AngularJS tutorial, Toptal engineer Raoni Boaventura guides you through the steps of setting up your project, including scaffolding, dependency management, and preparing it for testing.

A year after Google’s launch of Polymer, Toptal engineer Alejandro Hernandez takes it out for a test drive to see if it’s yet ready for prime time. This post explores the maturity and stability of Polymer.js as a foundation for large-scale application development. The results and conclusions from this analysis are provided, along with an introductory overview of the technology.

Python’s simple, easy-to-learn syntax can mislead Python developers – especially those who are newer to the language – into missing some of its subtleties and underestimating the power of the language.

In this article, Toptal’s Martin Chikilian presents a “top 10” list of somewhat subtle, harder-to-catch mistakes that can trip up even the most advanced Python developer.

JavaScript is much more nuanced than most developers initially realize. Even for those with more experience, some of JavaScript’s most salient features continue to be misunderstood and lead to confusion. One such feature, described in this article, is the way that property and variable lookups are performed and the resulting performance ramifications to be aware of.

C# is a powerful and flexible language with many mechanisms and paradigms that can greatly improve productivity. Having a limited understanding or appreciation of its capabilities, though, can leave one in the proverbial state of “knowing enough to be dangerous”. This article describes 10 of the most common programming mistakes made, or pitfalls to be avoided, by C# programmers.