Back-end

Are you a Scala developer hoping to scale your application in the cloud? If so, meet Kubernetes, a cluster manager for Docker applications. Developed by Google, it’s the latest in new open source tools making major waves.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michele Sciabarra guides us through a step-by-step tutorial on how to take a generic Scala application and implement Kubernetes and Docker to launch multiple instances of the application.

When dealing with web-based projects that run in the production environment, being able to build and deploy changes quickly is a top priority. However, repetitive processes such as building front-end assets, when not automated, can be prone to critical errors.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Anton Kanevsky shows us how Gulp can solve various challenges of build automation through simple JavaScript routines.

Many product owners don’t have a technical background and thus often find themselves unprepared and scrambling when it comes to bringing on a new development team. This often results in hindered progress, wasted time, and frustration for everyone involved. If this sounds like it could be you, either now or in the future, then you should be somewhat concerned.

In this blog post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Carlos Ramirez III will walk you through the various steps of a typical transition process in project management so you can prepare for this eventuality and make the transition as smooth as possible.

As a language, R is strongly tied to data and is thus used mostly by statisticians and data scientists. Many who already use R for machine learning, though, are not aware that data munging can be done faster in R, meaning another tool is not required for that task.

In this article, Freelance Software Engineer Jan Gorecki explores tabular data transformations and introduces us to one of the fastest open-source data wrangling tools available.

“So much of what’s new and exciting about Angular 2 is its new way of thinking rather than its new architecture,” says Toptal Freelance Developer Ethan James.

In this article, Ethan walks through the inner workings of a simple Angular 1.5 app and then shows us how to upgrade it to Angular 2 while giving us the necessary understanding to truly appreciate it.

How many times have you used the find-and-replace functionality (or RegEx) across a directory to make changes to JavaScript source files? Up your refactoring game by using codemods, scripts used to rewrite other scripts.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Jeremy Greer walks us through three common uses of codemods, using the toolkit “jscodeshift.”

More than 60 percent of trading activities with different assets rely on automated trading and machine learning instead of human traders. Today, specialized programs based on particular algorithms and learned patterns automatically buy and sell assets in various markets, with a goal to achieve a positive return in the long run.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Data Scientist Andrea Nalon explains how to predict, using machine learning and Python, which trade should be made next on the S&P 500 to get a positive gain.

Would you like to test your PHP code like a boss? Do you feel that basic unit tests and PHPUnit just don’t cut it anymore? If your answer to both questions is yes, you might want to try Codeception, a mature and well-documented testing framework designed to outperform PHPUnit and Behat.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vasily Koval describes how he came to take the plunge and start using Codeception, and he explains why you should check out Codeception for your PHP testing needs.

Before you use Unity’s straightforward and intuitive tool for multi-platform development, become familiar with and avoid these common Unity mistakes.

Software engineers are always searching for the best tools and guides to help them be more productive and allow them to spend less time reading long technical specifications.

Today, Toptal is pleased to present a new resource to the community: the JavaScript Cheat Sheet - ES6 and Beyond. Toptal’s JavaScript Cheat Sheet is a quick, easily understandable reference guide. It is free to download and includes all the new and exciting features introduced with ES6 as well as the future experimental features from ES7.

Some platforms have an overwhelming number of options for web frameworks. Node.js, the event-driven server-side JavaScript environment, is one such platform. Whether it’s the minimalist Express or the full-blown MVC web framework Sails.js, Node.js seems to have it all.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Chuoxian Yang explores four of the most popular Node.js web frameworks and discusses how each framework stands out from the rest of the crowd in Node.js.

Today, writing applications in languages that compile to JavaScript is a very common practice. Scala developers, for example, can use Scala.js and have the same language for both the server and the client. That said, Scala’s compiler and standard dependency management tools are too limiting in the modern JavaScript world.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michele Sciabarra shows us how to integrate Scala.js with the plethora of JavaScript modules available on NPM, using tools like Browserify, and explains how to do this without even having to install Node.js.

Concurrency allows programs to deal with a lot of tasks at once. But writing concurrent programs isn’t a particularly easy feat. Dealing with constructs such as threads and locks and avoiding issues like race conditions and deadlocks can be quite cumbersome, making concurrent programs difficult to write.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Marko Dvečko gives us an overview of some concurrent programming models. He explains how each of these models gives structure to the programs we write and shows how to avoid certain concurrency issues that can come with these models.

Node-RED, built on Node.js, is a tool designed for programming visually without having to write any code. It comes equipped with a browser-based flow editor that allows hardware devices and APIs to be connected with each other easily, making it an ideal tool for rapidly developing programs for IoT devices.

In this article, Toptal freelance software engineer Jesús Darío Rivera walks us through the process of building a simple program using Node-RED and Netbeast along with a virtual light bulb plugin that mimics the capabilities of a real smart bulb.

Streams are a powerful construct in Node.js and in I/O driven programming in general. Gulp, a tool for task automation, leverages streams in elegant ways to allow developers to enhance their build workflow.

In this article, Toptal engineer Mikhail Angelov gives us some insight into how Gulp works with streams by showing us step-by-step how to build a Gulp-like build automation tool.

Elixir, a dynamic, functional programming language, is designed for building scalable and maintainable applications with a simple, modern, and tidy syntax. Although it is easy to understand, Elixir’s approach to concurrency and its data type nuances require some getting used to.

In this article, Toptal engineer Kleber Virgilio Correia gives us a comprehensive guide to the various basic data types in that are available in Elixir.