Toptal Engineering Expert
No-Fuss AI for Your App: Meet Salesforce Einstein
The AI revolution is transforming the consumer world. Some developers may shy away from AI, which has traditionally been a heavily technical specialty. In this article, Toptal Freelance Salesforce Developer Fahad Munawar Khan explores how accessible to developers the AI cloud has become, even for non-Salesforce apps, with Salesforce Einstein.

Fahad Munawar Khan
Fahad is a Salesforce Certified Force.com Developer and web developer since 2011, including being a senior dev for clients like Honeywell.
Magento 2: Revision or Revolution?
Magento 2 was initially greeted with skepticism, but the maturity of the next generation of Magento development has brought on an explosion of new users. In this article, Toptal Freelance Magento Developer Vivek Khatri explains why it’s the top choice for eCommerce sites, new and old.

Vivek Khatri
Vivek is a Magento-certified developer who specializes in creating reliable, scalable e-commerce platforms tailored to client business needs, combining technical expertise with a strong focus on user experience and functionality.
GraphQL vs. REST: A GraphQL Tutorial
You might have heard about the new kid around the block: GraphQL. If not, GraphQL is, in a word, a new way to fetch APIs, an alternative to REST.

Amaury M
Amaury’s MSc/MEng degrees inform his full-stack work in web and mobile (Node.js, React, React Native) as well as blockchain app development.
A Guide to Performance Testing and Optimization With Python and Django
Donald Knuth said that “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” But there comes a time, usually in mature projects with high loads, when the need to optimize presents itself. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Iulian Gulea talks about five common methods to optimize a web project’s code using principles that can be used in Django, as well as in other frameworks and languages. Using these principles, he demonstrates how to reduce the response time of a query from 77 to 3.7 seconds.

Iulian Gulea
Iulian is a software engineer with experience developing web projects of all sizes, from simple sites to complex SaaS products. Previously a full-stack developer for PepsiCo, Iulian has worked both individually and in teams for companies large and small.
How to Create Exclusive Custom Taxonomies in WordPress
In WordPress, taxonomies allow you to flexibly organize your content in categories with tags and more. However, when defining custom taxonomies, you may not get the desired behavior out of the box.
In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Rodrigo Donini shows how exclusive custom taxonomies can be implemented in WordPress for strict categorization of posts.

Rodrigo Donini
Rodrigo has 17 years of experience in web and mobile projects. He has a strong knowledge base of the WordPress world.
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Introduction to Objects and References in PHP Memory
In this article, I will talk about how object and variable references are controlled in memory, since this is an issue that can generate discussion and differing opinions. One question to ponder is: “By default, are objects passed by reference or by copy in PHP?” I’m going to talk first about what references aren’t in PHP; second, I’ll discuss what they are, and finally, I will examine how the garbage collector works in PHP.

Agustin Villalba
Augustin is a Zend-certified full-stack PHP engineer with 10+ years of experience at the likes of FIFA and the European Molecular Bio Lab.
Trunk-based Development vs. Git Flow
In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Konrad Gadzinowski dissects trunk-based development and Git flow, listing the pros and cons for various use cases.

Konrad Gadzinowski
Konrad specializes in creating modular, full-stack web applications that are easy to extend. His main expertise is Java and JavaScript.
Implementing Serverless Node.js Functions Using Google Cloud
Serverless computing is an architecture style in which the code is executed in a cloud platform where we don’t need to worry about the hardware and software setup, security, performance, and CPU idle time costs. It’s an advancement of cloud computing that goes beyond infrastructure that abstracts the software environment as well. It means no configuration is required to run the code.

Vignes Aruljothi
Vignes specializes in web technologies and has many years of experience in building scalable applications using JavaScript and Node.js.
Getting Started With the SRVB Cryptosystem
This article will give you an introduction to the principles behind public-key cryptosystems and introduce you to the Santana Rocha-Villas Boas (SRVB) cryptosystem, developed by the author of the article and prof. Daniel Santana Rocha. The algorithm authors are making a campaign that includes a financial reward to anyone who manages to crack the code.

Yuri da Silva Villas Boas
Yuri has experience in C++ and a good background in mathematics, statistics, and physics. He developed the SRVB cryptosystems.
Guide to Spring Boot REST API Error Handling
Spring Boot provides beneficial error messages to engineers building REST APIs. Yet, those messages are useless for the general API consumer. We provide a simple approach to improving this functionality.

Bruno Leite
Bruno is a full-stack application architect and developer with more than 10 years of experience and a solid problem-solving track record.
Orchestrating a Background Job Workflow in Celery for Python
In this article, I will try to give you a good understanding of which scenarios could be covered by Celery. Not only will you see interesting examples, but will also learn how to apply Celery with real world tasks such as background mailing, report generation, logging and error reporting. I will share my own way of testing tasks beyond emulation and explain a few tricks that go beyond the official documentation and took me hours of research to discover myself.

Rustem Kamun
Rustem is a back-end dev with expertise in Python and Java stacks. He’s even implemented a scalable M2M cloud platform for vehicle data.
iOS Centralized and Decoupled Networking: AFNetworking Tutorial with a Singleton Class
The Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern is great for the longevity and maintainability of an iOS application’s codebase… but you may find yourself adding similar functions to multiple models as your app grows. In cases such as networking, moving common logic out of your model classes and into singleton helper classes can be a better approach. In this article, I’ll teach you how to set up a centralized singleton networking object that, decoupled from micro-level MVC components, can be reused throughout your application.

James Cahall
James is a veteran, result-driven engineer with 7+ years of C-level experience. He is lead developer of a service with 8 million users.
Guide to Data Synchronization in Microsoft SQL Server
Sharing related information among isolated systems has become increasingly important. There are many methods to choose from to perform that task for SQL Server, but it’s important to know which is better for each use case.

Andrej Gajdos
With a Master’s degree in Service Science, Management, and Engineering, Andrej works on projects of all sizes for clients around the world.
The 12 Worst Mistakes Advanced WordPress Developers Make
WordPress is a very popular way to get a site up and running quickly. However, in their haste, plenty of developers end up making horrible decisions. Some mistakes, like leaving WP_DEBUG set to “true,” may be easy to make. Others, like lumping all your JavaScript into a single file, are as common as lazy engineers. Whichever mistake you manage to make, read on to find out the 12 most common WordPress mistakes that new and seasoned developers make.

Gabriel Livan
Gabriel is a full-stack web developer based in London, with 7+ years experience in PHP and WordPress plugin and theme development.
Creating a Ruby DSL: A Guide to Advanced Metaprogramming
Write better Ruby code by leveraging its metaprogramming features. In this article, you will learn how to create your own Ruby domain specific language (DSL).

Máté Solymosi
Máté is a full-stack software engineer with 8+ years of experience in JavaScript, Node.js, Angular, Ruby on Rails and PHP.
A Guide to Process-oriented Programming in Elixir and OTP
Process-oriented programming is a paradigm in which the process structure and communication between processes of a system are the primary concerns. That’s the paradigm, but how does it work in real life?

Michael Latta
Michael is a software engineer with deep technical and leadership skills. As an entrepreneur, he is both a leader and a team player.
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