Toptal Engineering Blog

When using a JavaScript framework, your browser doesn’t receive a complete page to display. Instead it gets a bunch of pieces and instructions of how to put them all together. It takes a substantial amount of time to put all this information together before your browser actually has something to display.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Front-end Engineer Ben Jones introduces us to Nuxt.js, a server-side rendering library for Vue.js, inspired by the popular Next.js for React.js.

Deep learning has proven its power across many domains, from beating humans at complex board games to synthesizing music. It has also been used extensively in natural language processing.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun (Sean) Wang shows how easy it is to build a text classification program using different techniques and how well they perform against each other.

Rails ships with everything you need to prototype your application quickly, but when your codebase starts growing, you’ll run into scenarios where the conventional Fat Model, Skinny Controller mantra breaks. When your business logic can’t fit in either a model or a controller, that’s when service objects come in and let us separate every business action into its own Ruby object.

Spring Integration enables lightweight messaging within Spring-based applications.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Adnan Kukuljac shows how Spring Integration with Redis makes it easy to build a microservice architecture.

Go is quickly becoming one of the most popular languages: It currently ranks 19 in the TIOBE programming community index, and powers popular software like Kubernetes, Docker, and Heroku CLI. However, for all its simplicity, Go may still be missing some things.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Go Developer Sergei Peshkov shares his concerns about why Go is still far from perfect and how we can make it better.

Online users are becoming increasingly resistant to traditional email/password registration processes. One-click social logins via Facebook, Google, or GitHub are better, but they come with data privacy trade-offs.

This article introduces a one-click, cryptographically-secure login flow using MetaMask, with all data stored on the app’s own back-end.

Machine learning, combined with some standard image processing techniques, can result in powerful video analysis tools.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michael Karchevsky walks through a solution for a machine learning competition that identifies the species and lengths of any fish present in a given video segment.

As a good JavaScript developer, you strive to write clean, healthy, and maintainable code. While you solve interesting and unique challenges, you’ve likely found that you’re often writing code that looks similar to the code for an entirely different problem you’ve handled before. You may not know it, but you’ve used a design pattern.

As applications become more complex, having good logs can be very useful, not only when debugging but also to provide insight in application issue/performance.

The Python standard library comes with a logging module that provides most of the basic logging features and is very handy but contains some quirks that can cause hours of headaches

Dealing with a real database for integration and end-to-end testing can pose some challenges. One way of working around them is to use an in-memory database that integrates well with the testing framework and provides APIs to manipulate its state from test code.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Mikhail Angelov shows how you can write integration and end-to-end tests easily for your Node.js and MongoDB application without having to write complicated setup/teardown code.

Launch yourself into Ethereum smart contract development with the Truffle framework! In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Ethereum Developer Radek Ostrowski shows you how to create a practical ĐApp in the Solidity language, complete with its own ERC20 token.

For a large codebase, managing database schema can become tedious, especially if you maintain multiple testing environments or customers that update the product at different paces. Sometimes, documenting the latest schema or database changes isn’t enough.

In this article, Toptal Database Engineer Ivan Pavlov introduces us to concepts that help manage database states.

Angular 5 is a new version of the Angular framework developed by Google. Angular 5 comes with improvements including optimized builds and faster compile times, but in this Angular 5 tutorial, we are going to build a notes app from scratch. If you’ve been waiting to learn Angular 5, this tutorial is for you.

Open-source, IoT, and Ethereum smart contracts work together with a new utility coin to make transportation more accessible and reduce vehicle waste. In this article, Toptal Freelance Ethereum Developer Michał Mikolajczyk explains the motivations and methodology behind his startup’s latest initiative.

Mixed-integer programming is one of the many ways you can automate and enhance your decision-making processes.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun Wang explores the power of operations research by walking through a hypothetical problem and shows how mixed-integer programming can be used to solve it.

While machine learning sounds highly technical, an introduction to the statistical methods involved quickly brings it within reach. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vladyslav Millier explores basic supervised machine learning algorithms and scikit-learn, using them to predict survival rates for Titanic passengers.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Piotr Gaczkowski explains how to make the most out of command line tools and lists some of the best tools out there.

Apache JMeter and REST Assured are two very popular Java-based tools for automated testing of REST API services.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Nemanja Veskovic gives us an overview of the pros and cons of both of these tools and shows where they fit best in your existing REST API projects.

Non-Salesforce app developers may be overlooking a hidden gem in the AI world: Salesforce Einstein offers image recognition and text analysis for plain-vanilla apps and Salesforce apps alike. In this article, Toptal Freelance Salesforce Developer Fahad Munawar Khan shows how any any developer can leverage Einstein Vision and Einstein Language.

Asynchronous programming used to be a challenge even for seasoned professionals, leading to aptly named phenomena like Callback Hell.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Demir Selmanovic explains how async functions took us out of purgatory and why you should be using them.

Fragment caching in Rails provides an easy yet a powerful way of improving your application’s performance. However, some real-world scenarios do not work quite well with how the Rails cache behaves by default.

In this article, Toptal Ruby on Rails Developer Orban Botond shows how you can implement a small DSL to optimize how the cache for related entities is invalidated to improve template rendering performance.