Toptal Engineering Expert
SQL Database Performance Tuning for Developers
Database tuning can be an incredibly difficult task, particularly when working with large-scale data where even the most minor change can have a dramatic (positive or negative) impact on performance.
In mid-sized and large companies, most database tuning will be handled by a Database Administrator (DBA). But there are plenty of developers who have to perform DBA-like tasks; meanwhile, DBAs often struggle to work well with developers.
In this article, learn database tuning tips and how developers and DBAs can work together effectively.
Kevin Bloch
Kevin has 20+ years among full-stack, desktop, and indie game development. He lately specializes in PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Perl, and Haxe.
Tree Kernels: Quantifying Similarity Among Tree-structured Data
Today, a massive amount of data is available in the form of networks or graphs. For example, the World Wide Web, with its web pages and hyperlinks, social networks, semantic networks, biological networks, citation networks for scientific literature, and so on.
A tree is a special type of graph, and is naturally suited to represent many types of data. The analysis of trees is an important field in computer and data science. In this article, we will look at the analysis of the link structure in trees. In particular, we will focus on tree kernels, a method for comparing tree graphs to each other, allowing us to get quantifiable measurements of their similarities or differences. This an important process for many modern applications such as classification and data analysis.
Dino Causevic
Dino (BCS) has 6+ years in software development, specializing in back-end and security work using Java, Elasticsearch, .NET, and Python.
How I Used Apache Spark and Docker in a Hackathon to Build a Weather App
Hackathons often inspire engineers to create amazing software. By blending various technologies together, really useful and often fun projects can be realized in a short period of time.
In this article, Toptal engineer Radek Ostrowski shares his experience participating in the IBM Sparkathon, and walks us through how he elegantly combined the power of Apache Spark and Docker in IBM Bluemix to build a weather app.
Radek Ostrowski
Radek is a blockchain engineer with an interest in Ethereum smart contracts. He also has extensive experience in machine learning.
Ensemble Methods: Elegant Techniques to Produce Improved Machine Learning Results
Machine Learning, in computing, is where art meets science. Perfecting a machine learning tool is a lot about understanding data and choosing the right algorithm. But why choose one algorithm when you can choose many and make them all work to achieve one thing: improved results.
In this article, Toptal Engineer Necati Demir walks us through some elegant techniques of ensemble methods where a combination of data splits and multiple algorithms is used to produce machine learning results with higher accuracy.
Necati Demir, PhD
Necati holds a PhD degree in Machine Learning and has 14 years of experience in software development.
Guide to Multi-processing Network Server Models
In this article, Toptal engineer Ivan Voras provides a useful overview and comparison of multi-processing network server models, with the goal being to take some of the mystery out of writing high performance networking code. The article is intended for “system programmers”, i.e., back-end developers who will work with the low-level details of their applications, implementing network server code.
Ivan Voras, PhD
Ivan’s 15+ years of back-end and blockchain architecture has seen everything from DBA ops to development of OS kernel modules (FreeBSD).
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MySQL Master-Slave Replication on the Same Machine
Developers often work on only one machine, and have their whole development environment on that machine. Testing database replication before deploying changes in this kind of a development environment can be a challenging task.
In this article, Toptal engineer Ivan Bojovic guides us through a step-by-step tutorial on how to implement MySQL master-slave replication on one machine.
Ivan Bojovic
Ivan has over 11 years of experience with MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and other database systems, and is a certified MySQL DBA.
Building an IMAP Email Client with PHP
Developers sometimes run into tasks that require access to email mailboxes. In most cases, this is done using the Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP. As a PHP developer, I first turned to PHP’s built in IMAP library, but this library is buggy and impossible to debug or modify. So today we will create a working IMAP email client from the ground up using PHP. We will also see how to use Gmail’s special commands.
Artem Galtsev
Artem is a web developer and programmer with 10+ years of experience working with large organizations and on his own.
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