Back-end

Time and date manipulation is notoriously difficult. Developers encountering time zone rules, leap seconds, differences in locale-specific formatting are wise to resort to popular time and date manipulation libraries. But without thinking about how exactly they work, it’s still easy to create all sorts of obscure bugs.

Git provides basic branching operations, but advanced patterns are left up to the user. The popular “Git flow” branching model helps, but can also complicate some common procedures.

Thankfully, a new variation retains the benefits, while streamlining everyday work.

Learn practical TypeScript patterns with interfaces and extended classes. Avoid messy console.log() statements with Winston and the Node.js debug module. Create an Express.js-powered REST API back end from scratch!

Spring Security is the de facto framework for securing Spring apps, but it can be tricky to configure.

This Spring Security tutorial highlights an efficient JWT solution.

As patterns go, REST APIs are so useful and ubiquitous that every web developer, regardless of language or platform, should know how to build them.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Marcos Henrique da Silva shows how to create a simple and secure REST API for user management on Node.js.

Good programming language frameworks make it easy to produce quality products faster. Great frameworks even make the whole development experience enjoyable. FastAPI is a new Python web framework that’s powerful and enjoyable to use.

JavaScript frameworks based on React can help you build a fast, reliable mobile app, but it’s not always easy to determine which framework is best for your project. Choosing the wrong framework can result in an app with slow and redundant code.

JavaScript expert Sean Wang builds the same natural language processing mobile application using Cordova, Ionic, and React Native, then discusses the advantages and limitations of each.

Sorting a table can make some queries faster—but the maintenance cost is untenable. Enter real database indexes and their most common implementation structure: the B-tree.

As products and services deploy faster and faster, quality assurance (QA) has to adapt and deliver more coverage in less time while maintaining high quality.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Jade Russel Hancox examines how we can use the user flow to boost the speed and efficiency of QA processes without compromising on quality.

Kubernetes (“K8s”) won the battle of container orchestration tools. Now AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each offer a managed Kubernetes version. How do they compare?

Node.js developers often find themselves working with chaotic code that’s anything but clean. This can obviously cause productivity issues and outright errors.

In this article, Toptal Full-stack Developer Jay Huang will introduce you to error-handling in Node.js and demonstrate how you can build a robust error-handling system yourself.

Setting up authentication and state in a stateless API context might seem somewhat problematic. But Laravel Passport gives developers a clean, straightforward way to add OAuth 2.0 to an app’s API.

TensorFlow is one of the leading tools for training deep learning models. Outside that space, it may seem intimidating and unnecessary, but it has many creative uses—like producing highly effective adversarial input for black-box AI systems.

Kotlin has features that make it an ideal language for back-end development. Learn what these features are and how you can use them to create high-performing systems.

Properly used, an SQL database index can be so effective that it might seem like magic. But the following series of exercises will show that underneath, the logic of most SQL indexes—and wielding them correctly—is quite straightforward.

Customer Relationship Management systems provide businesses with more clarity and information about customer behavior, helping boost sales, retain existing customers, and attract new ones.

In this article, Toptal Software Developer Leif Gensert outlines the basic challenges of CRM integration and explains what you can do to make the process as efficient and frictionless as possible.