Back-end

Could you be using Git more efficiently?

The answer is probably a resounding “Yes,” which is why Toptal Software Engineer Ursula Clarke wrote today’s post.

In it, she teaches you how to use git stash, git reset, git bisect, git squash, and git rebase for maximum productivity.

So you’ve implemented user authentication. Now, you want to allow your users to log in with Twitter, Facebook, or Google. No problem. You’re only a few lines of code away from doing so.

But while there are hundreds of OAuth 2 packages that pip knows, only a few actually do what they’re supposed to do.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Peter Goodspeed-Niklaus explains how to integrate OAuth 2 into your Django or Django Rest Framework using Python Social Auth.

C is often called a middle-level computer language since it combines the elements of high-level languages with the functionalism of assembly language. C++ is an enhanced version of the C language, which adds support for object-oriented programming.

In back-end software development, increased productivity often comes at the cost of performance. In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Eduardo Bautista shows us how the Phoenix framework builds on the familiar concepts from the Rails world, and makes it even easier to build robust concurrent applications without compromising performance.

In an ever growing ecosystem of rich and complicated JavaScript applications, there’s more state to be managed than ever before: the current user, the list of posts loaded, etc.Managing state can be hard and error prone, but immutability and Redux- a predictable state container for JavaScript apps- can help significantly.

In this article, Toptal Programmer David Xu talks about managing state using immutability with Redux, a predictable state container.

Making your website or web app available to a wider audience often requires it to be available in multiple languages. For non-English projects, you can increase your audience by releasing it in English as well as your native language. Internationalizing and localizing your project, however, becomes a much easier process if you start during its infancy.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Igor Gomes dos Santos shows us how to leverage simple tools, like Gettext and Poedit, to internationalize and localize a PHP project.

Software is regular and predictable, so it seems paradoxical that practically every web app needs a sizable administrative area. The explanation for this paradox lies in software’s interaction with humans. While you probably can’t build a fully automated system, there’s a lot you can do to save time and money.

In this post, Entrepreneur Jack Kinsella explains what you can do to streamline administration, thus saving valuable time and making your projects more profitable. Adminimisation is the word of the day!

Today, WordPress covers more than 50 percent of website shares and serves nearly 60 million websites worldwide. Its popularity has resulted in many misconceptions that have grown and spread like a forest fire, and have made people stay away from WordPress.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Donald Mudenge explains the five most common WordPress taboos and myths, clarifies them, and offers solutions on how to overcome them.

Your software isn’t fully tested until you write integration tests for it. While unit tests help ensure that functions are properly written, integration tests help ensure that the system is working properly as a whole.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Luka Blažecki uses Node.js to explain why integration testing is important for every development platform and how to write clean, composable integration tests.

In the past few years, Microsoft has pulled a few aces from up its sleeve. Yes, they messed up Skype, failed with smartphones, and almost succeeded with tablets. But they did some really amazing things as well.

Relinquishing their closed empire approach, they open-sourced .NET, joined the Linux Foundation, released SQL Server for Linux, and created this great new tool called Visual Studio for Mac.

In this post, Head of Open Source Demir Selmanovic details how to make an Android and iOS app in C# on your Mac.

Limited SQL scalability has prompted industry leaders like Google and Amazon to develop NoSQL database management systems that optimize for performance, reliability, and consistency. In this article, Senior Software Engineer Mohammad Altarade explores some of the most popular NoSQL database options on the market and explains why this paradigm for storing and retrieving data will be with us for years to come.

WordPress, one of the most popular publishing platforms, has stood the test of time and now powers a significant portion of the web. Sadly, its reputation is plagued by claims of poor performance and complexity with scaling. However, the root causes of such performance issues are often bad code and poorly implemented plugins and themes.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Martín Di Felice shares tips and tricks for WordPress developers who want to build better plugins and themes and destroy the notion that WordPress is a slow platform.

Your website is gaining traction, and you are growing rapidly. Ruby/Rails is your programming language of choice. Your team is bigger and you’ve given up on “fat models, skinny controllers” as a design style for your Rails apps. However, you still don’t want to abandon using Rails? No problem.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Eqbal Quran explains how you can decouple and isolate your Rails components using nothing Plain Old Ruby Objects. Ruby objects and abstractions can decouple concerns, simplify testing, and help you produce clean, maintainable code.

Most modern programming languages, in the hopes of enhanced maintainability and reusability of code, offer some constructs that help the developer keep the definition of behavior and its implementation separate.

Swift takes the idea of interfaces a step further with protocols. With protocols and protocol extensions, Swift allows developers to enforce elaborate conformity rules without compromising the expressiveness of the language.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Alexander Gaidukov explores Swift protocols and how protocol-oriented programming can improve the maintainability and reusability of your code.

Let’s face it: Sometimes you just need to rant. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. It’s called devRant, and it’s the place for developers to vent about clients from hell, non-technical friends and family, and clueless recruiters.

In this roundup, devRant Co-Founder David Fox shares his favorite collection of rants since launching. Some will make you laugh. Others will make you laugh so hard you cry. And just about all of them will make you empathize with the author.

Caching is a powerful technique for increasing performance, but the whole idea behind caching works only as long as the result we cached remains valid. And here we get to the hard part of the problem: How do we determine when a cached item has become invalid and needs to be recreated?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Daniel Ivanov provides an ASP.NET-based solution to replace invalid cached items and assure high throughput and performance of web applications designed to handle a high load.