Optimization

Premature optimization hurts experts and novices alike. How can you know when and how to optimize without shooting your project in the foot? This week, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Kevin Bloch walks project managers through some time-tested optimization strategies and when to use them.

Optimization sounds ideal. Ironically, the very aspect of our code we are trying to optimize can be sabotaged by this process, taking out innocent bystanders along the way. Is it a perfectionists' goldmine...or minefield? In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Kevin Bloch offers a more balanced approach to the art and science of optimization.

Why does a React web app run slow? The answer often lies in when and how frequently your components re-render, and whether those re-renders were even necessary. React doesn’t promise magical performance gains, but it provides just the right tools and functionalities to make it easy. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer William Wang walks us through some optimization techniques that can help you build performant React web apps.

Many problems have optimal algorithms developed for them, while many others require us to randomly guess until we get a good answer. Even an optimal solution becomes slow and complex at a certain scale, at which point we can turn to natural processes to see how they reach acceptable results. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Eugene Ossipov walks us through the basics of creating a Genetic Algorithm and gives us the knowledge to delve deeper into solving any problems using this approach.

Image processing algorithms are often very resource intensive due to fact that they process pixels on an image one at a time and often requires multiple passes. Successive Mean Quantization Transform (SMQT) is one such resource intensive algorithm that can process images taken in low-light conditions and reveal details from dark regions of the image. In this article, Toptal engineer Daniel Angel Munoz Trejo gives us some insight into how the SMQT algorithm works and walks us through a clever optimization technique to make the algorithm a viable option for handheld devices.