Back-end

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

Dropwizard allows developers to quickly bootstrap their projects and package applications as easily deployable standalone services. It also happens to be relatively simple to use and implement.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Dusan Simonovic will introduce you to Dropwizard and demonstrate how you can use this powerful framework to create RESTful web services with ease.

Docker itself has been around for years and is composed of many inter-operating pieces. One of them is Docker Swarm, which allows you to declare your applications as stacks of services and let Docker handle the rest.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Leah Sapan explains how to use Docker Swarm to deploy your own self-managing stack, followed by a quick example.