Toptal Engineering Blog

JSON web tokens (JWTs) provide a method of authenticating requests that’s convenient, compact, and secure. More often than not, Angular apps will include them in their data flows.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Sebastian Schocke shows how to implement JWT authentication in an Angular 6 single-page application (SPA), complete with a Node.js back-end.

C++ developers strive to build robust multithreaded applications, but multithreading was never an easy thing to do.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Qt Developer Andrei Smirnov talks about several scenarios exploring concurrent programming with the Qt framework.

The modern, cross-platform programming language Haxe is well-known in some circles, yet many developers have never heard of it. Since it first appeared in 2005, it’s been battle-tested by its loyal—if rather quiet—following.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Kevin Bloch explores the Haxe ecosystem and how to transpile some sample code.

Despite its age, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) remains a widely used standard in adaptive bitrate video and a de-facto Apple alternative to MPEG-DASH.

In this tutorial, Toptal Java Developer Tomo Krajina explains what makes HLS tick and demonstrates how to create an HLS player in Android.

The development of cross-platform mobile applications has always been a source of many challenges. Although tools like Apache Cordova and Haxe do solve some of the associated issues, they are still not the ideal solution in many cases. React Native changes that by providing the power of React.js for mobile platforms and a promise of consistent developer experience across multiple platforms.

The microservices architectural pattern is an architectural style that is growing in popularity, given its flexibility and resilience.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Python Developer Guilherme Caminha will focus on building a proof of concept microservices application in Python using Nameko, a microservices framework.

Qmake is a build system tool shipped with Qt library that simplifies the build process across different platforms.

In this guide, Freelance Qt Developer Andrei Smirnov describes the most useful qmake features and provides real-world examples for each of them.

While preprocessors like Sass and Less have made CSS development easier, there is still a lot to be desired in this modern age of web development.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Jeremy Davis explores styled-components—the niftiest CSS-in-JS library.

Computational photography is about enhancing the photographic process with computation. While we normally tend to think that this applies only to post-processing the end result (similar to photo editing), the possibilities are much richer since computation can be enabled at every step of the photographic process—starting with scene illumination.

In this article, Toptal OpenCV Expert Radu Balaban walks us through two examples of computational photography: low light and high dynamic range.

Threading is just one of the many ways concurrent programs can be built. In this article, we will take a look at threading and a couple of other strategies in building concurrent programs in Python, as well as discuss how each is suitable in different scenarios.

Mobile applications are creeping in. Developing for each mobile platform can be an exhaustive task, especially if resources are limited. This is where Apache Cordova comes in handy by providing a way to develop mobile applications using standard web technologies - HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. This article explores how one can get started with Apache Cordova and build mobile applications targeted at a wide range of mobile devices.

Do you run deployment scripts from your development machine, or find yourself referring to deployments by the day of the week they were deployed, instead of using version numbers? It’s time for a better solution.

In this article, Freelance Ruby Engineer and automation enthusiast Amin Shah Gilani walks you through his perfect deployment pipeline to use at the beginning of your project. With this CI/CD configuration, every push is tested, the master branch is deployed to staging servers with a fresh database dump from the production server, and versioned tags are deployed to production with backups and migrations running automatically.

Software delivery has come a long way. And, somewhere between the transition from physical media to software containers, we have changed the way we try to manage them.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jonathan Bethune explores how software containers have motivated us to treat servers as more dispensable, and the risks and rewards involved.

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.