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 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.