Technology

Writing reusable code that can be shared across multiple platforms can make developing mobile applications a lot easier. But, how do you do that without paying the usual cost of maintainability, ease of testing, and poor user experience that comes with cross-platform mobile application development?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Emran Bajrami walks us through Xamarin and shows us techniques for building high-quality cross-platform apps.

Security has always been a primary concern for database experts, and with the advent of new, decentralized services, it’s become even more crucial. Microsoft addressed the need for an added level of security in SQL with the introduction of Always Encrypted functionality in SQL Server 2016.

In this blog post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Josip Saban explains how Microsoft’s Always Encrypted concept works, how it’s implemented, and why developers can’t afford to ignore it.

If there is something every front-end developer wants, it is proper support for variables in CSS. For years, to work around this missing feature, developers have resorted to CSS preprocessors. However, all that changes with the introduction of CSS custom properties.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Nicolás J. Engler walks us through CSS custom properties and shows us how they can be used to make better, more dynamic stylesheets.

Learn how, with the right remote worker security policy, distributed teams can be just as secure as in-house teams.

Toptal Freelance Software Engineer and full-time remote worker Amin Shah Gilani walks us through common security attack methods, cyber defense strategies, and, finally, an example of a good remote worker security policy.

In this tutorial, we will look at some common mistakes that are often made by Django developers and ways to avoid them. This tutorial is useful even if you’re a skilled Django developer because these mistakes aren’t just limited to new developers taking their first stab at Django.

Deploying new features with Salesforce can be problematic in more ways than one. It is crucial to have a sound strategy governing the publication of new releases, without running the risk of breaking your product.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Ajinkya Deshmukh will provide you with all relevant information and key tips that will allow you to manage your next Salesforce release smoothly.

Magento built a reputation as an e-commerce market leader, all thanks to its ease of use and customizability. Getting into the framework was only made easier with the release of Magento 2.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Gabriel Queiroz Silva gives us a step-by-step tutorial to building your first Magento 2 website.

Fat controllers and models: an inevitable problem for most large-scale projects based on MVC frameworks such as Yii and Laravel. Fortunately, there’s a cure, and it’s in architecting a layered structure.

Natural language is increasingly becoming a viable way of interacting with smart software. Google search, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, etc. are all capable of understanding queries in natural language.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun (Sean) Wang walks us through some useful concepts and techniques in natural language processing and shows how they can be used to build a simple NLP app.

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.

Although CSS was meant to deal with styling, creating extraordinary layouts on the web has always been a unique challenge and almost always required the developer to resort to JavaScript. However, Flexbox is here to change that.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Diego Díaz walks us through the basics of Flexbox and some cool examples of how Flexbox can be used to build smart CSS-only layouts.

Java’s open source Spring framework is a popular tool for creating high performing applications using plain old Java objects, but as with any tool, inappropriate use can lead to trouble. In this article, we cover the most common pitfalls of using the Spring framework so new and experienced developers alike have a roadmap of what to avoid.

Java has some idiosyncrasies of its own and design choices that can make it rather verbose. While Java is a mature and performant programming language, developers frequently need to write boilerplate code that bring little or no real value other than complying with some set of constraints and conventions.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Miguel García López shows how Project Lombok can help dramatically reduce the amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written in a Java application.

Android provides many ways of creating and managing threads, and third-party libraries exist to make that even easier. However, with so many options, choosing the right approach can be quite confusing.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Eliran Goshen discusses some common scenarios in Android development that involve threading and how each of the scenarios can be dealt with.

Using Mockito is not just a matter of adding another dependency. It requires changing how you think about your unit tests while removing a lot of boilerplate. In this article, we cover multiple mock interfaces, listening invocations, matchers, and argument captors, and see firsthand how Mockito makes your tests cleaner and easier to understand.

Developing a mobile app for multiple platforms can be quite costly. Implementing the same functionalities in multiple programming languages and dealing with a plethora of unique libraries for each platform requires a massive amount of time and knowledge.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Sylvain Gravel talks about Xamarin and its companion technologies that let you build mobile applications for multiple platforms without compromising familiarity, performance, and uniqueness.