Toptal Engineering Blog

A monorepository is a code management and architectural concept whereby you keep all your isolated bits of code in one super repository instead of managing multiple smaller repositories—like a single repository for your website and mobile apps.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Front-end Developer Alexander Noel attempts to gather and explain as much information as possible about how and when to use monorepos.

It’s easy to start working with a spreadsheet, but it also takes time to master your skills to use all the powerful features it provides. When you start feeling comfortable with formulas, functions, pivot tables, etc., there is still one more level which allows you to achieve even more—custom extensions.

In this article, I’m going to focus on extending Google Spreadsheets with a Google Apps Script that validates European Union VAT IDs via API calls.

REST APIs are used in every language and on every platform. Building a secure REST API is a must-have tool in every developer’s arsenal.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Sergio Moretti shows how to secure a REST API using Spring Boot.

Bulletproof data validation is fundamental to implementing a back-end API. Find out how datalize, a Node.js library, makes this easy—and formats your data nicely, too.

The React Context API was been around as an experimental feature for a while now but finally became safe to use in production last year, solving one major problem React problem — prop drilling.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Javascript Developer Boris Yordanov will introduce us to the API and illustrate it with two basic web store apps, one built with the Context API and one without it.

Handling concurrency in Swift can cause headaches and pyramids of doom. HoneyBee is a futures/promises library that makes concurrent programming easy, expressive, and safe.

Join Toptal Swift Developer Alex Lynch in exploring the performance and readability advantage of using this library.

Discord is a popular real-time messaging platform with robust support for programmable bots. Bots are ubiquitous on Discord and provide a wide range of services, including moderation assistance, games, music, internet searches, payment processing, and more.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer and Chatbot Developer Randall Schmidt will start by discussing the Discord UI and APIs for bots before moving on to a Discord bot tutorial. We’ll also hear from ImBursting, the developer of Rythm—one of Discord’s most popular bots—and his experiences developing and maintaining his significant infrastructure and codebase.

HorusLP is a new Python tool designed to help with the architecture of algorithm development workflows. It provides an architectural framework for the development of optimization algorithms.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun Wang explains how HorusLP came to be and demonstrates its capabilities with a few example algorithms.

Salesforce is probably the most popular CRM platform, with various products giving you the power to put your business thoughts into action.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer and Salesforce Certified Application Architect and Platform Developer (II) Jayant Nathani explains how Salesforce can help automate your business processes for a more efficient business.

In recent years, React went from being an also-ran in the JavaScript universe to the most popular JS library. However, how does React stack up against Angular and VueJS in 2019?

In the first part of our React tutorial series, Toptal JavaScript Developer Kamil Jakubczak outlines the reasons behind React’s popularity and explains how to get started on your first React app.

Without proper state management, your Angular app will become a UX nightmare. But even with that solved, persisting state across sessions and devices can be tricky. This tutorial shows how to leapfrog that challenge using Firebase.

As simple as your RESTful API may be, even internal users will want a JavaScript package that will do all the heavy lifting for them. Why build each CRUD request by hand, or worse, deal with related resources using custom code for every scenario? With ActiveResource.js, you don’t have to.

The Elastic Stack is constantly releasing new and amazing features, and often delivers two new releases every month. However, even though the Elastic website maintains clear and detailed documentation, every upgrade involves a series of tedious steps. That is why one engineer decided to automate the whole process.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Linux Developer Renato Araujo walks us through a series of Ansible Playbooks he developed to auto-upgrade his Elastic Stack installation.

It’s easy to get entangled in spaghetti code, fuzzy responsibilities, and opaque architecture. It is just as easy to write crisp, clear code that is just as easy to write, maintain, and update with a little forethought.

Join Toptal Android Developer Tomasz Czura as he guides you through the process and the reasoning behind creating clean architecture on Android.

F# is a strongly typed, multi-paradigm programming language with imperative, functional, and object-oriented programming methods.

In the first part of our F# tutorial series, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun Wang demonstrates how to get started and create a simple app using nothing but F#.

Keeping your Android codebase maintainable as your codebase grows can be a challenge. In this article, Toptal Freelance Android Developer Abhishek Tyagi shows how to combine MVVM with Clean Architecture—the latter as described by Robert C. Martin—to write decoupled, testable, and maintainable code.

iOS developers love the power of UIKit, and animating a UIView is usually fairly easy. However, if you want to chain animations together and set up dependencies between them, your code can quickly become difficult to read with many nested closures and indentation levels.

In this article, I’ll explore how to apply the power of a reactive framework such as RxSwift to make that code look much cleaner as well as easier to read and follow. My client wanted a story told through a sequence of animations rather than by playing a pre-rendered video, and with RxSwift, we easily tweaked it to perfection.

Magento is an extremely popular eCommerce platform used by businesses of all sizes, so what can we do to make it faster and more efficient? In this article, Toptal Freelance Magento Developer Paul Mestereaga explains what you can do to improve the performance of your Magento site.

Code reuse turns lazy developers into efficient geniuses. Imagine if you could write the majority of your code once and run it on the web and native mobile—both iOS and Android.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Dart Developer Marko Perutović introduces us to the BLoC pattern, whereby you can isolate your business logic in pure Dart and reuse it in both Flutter and AngularDart.

JavaScript is an oddball of a language with numerous approaches to almost any problem. When ES6 added the “class” keyword, did it save the day or just muddy the waters? In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Justen Robertson explores OOP in modern JS.

Project management tools have dramatically transformed the way software is engineered, but which one should you use, and when?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Juan Carlos Arias Ambriz outlines the differences between Jira and Trello and explains how you should choose between them.