Technology

Face it, you’re a software engineer, not a graphic designer. When you need to write a manual, technical document, or report, you just want to write it and be done with it. Especially for you as a software engineer – who is not put off by needing to learn and use some basic syntax conventions – Markdown can be the path of least resistance between what you want to write and getting it written.

Node.js, the cross-platform runtime environment, has seen its fair share of praise and criticism for what it offers to developers. Often, reasons for such criticisms are rooted in how developers use/misuse the language.

This article explores ten common mistakes that Node.js developers make and how to avoid them.

Meteor makes developing web applications simple. It’s easy to learn, and comes with a pre-built arsenal of powerful functionalities. In this article, we will walk through a detailed tutorial for building a simple real-time web application.

In this post, Toptal engineer Radek Ostrowski introduces Apache Spark—fast, easy-to-use, and flexible big data processing. Billed as offering “lightning fast cluster computing”, the Spark technology stack incorporates a comprehensive set of capabilities, including SparkSQL, Spark Streaming, MLlib (for machine learning), and GraphX. Spark may very well be the “child prodigy of big data,” rapidly gaining a dominant position in the complex world of big data processing.

Authentication is one of the most important parts of any web application. For decades, cookies and server-based authentication was the easiest solution. However, handling authentication in modern Mobile and Single Page Applications can be tricky and demand a better approach. One of the best known solutions to authentication problems for APIs is the JSON Web Token (JWT).

Over time, the race between DirectX and OpenGL has caused these technologies to become more accessible to developers, along with better documentation and an easier process of getting started with them. This tutorial article shows you how to build a 3D modeling application that generates and renders 3D texts from user inputs.

In an attempt to make web applications a lot more dynamic, front-end Javascript frameworks like Angular.js, Backbone.js and Ember.js have gained a lot of popularity. However, these frameworks often require a back-end application to be useful, so they are used in conjunction with web frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django.

On the other hand, Volt is capable of managing the back-end and a dynamic front-end; since both functionalities are tightly integrated into its core.

After a couple of years of bullish forecasts and big promises, security seems to be the biggest IoT concern. The first few weeks of 2015 were not kind to this emerging industry, and most of the negative press revolved around security.

Was it justified? Was it just “fear, uncertainty and doubt” (FUD), brought about by years of hype? It was bit of both; although some issues may have been overblown, the problems are very real, indeed.

In Part I of this three-part series on game physics, we explored rigid bodies and their motions. In that discussion, however, objects did not interact with each other. Without some additional work, the simulated rigid bodies can go right through each other.

In Part II, we will cover the collision detection step, which consists of finding pairs of bodies that are colliding among a possibly large number of bodies scattered around a 2D or 3D world.

Since programmers spend so much time using their favorite editor, they become extremely good at it, and are reluctant to learn to use any other. Even if offered a better editor for some specific task, the skilled programmer can get their existing editor to do the task just well enough, and therefore sees no need to learn how to use a new one.

This is what compelled me to try out a number of different editors and make the transition as easy as possible; I hope my experience saves you time and effort if you find yourself in the same situation.

When entering the remote developers’ world, the biggest obstacle that managers must overcome is to change their mindset by accepting that the developer will not be in plain sight, and where they can manage and follow the work being done.

This new paradigm requires businesses to implement a number of mechanisms to track progress and avoid a redundant workload. Such mechanisms will help both manager and developer be more productive, which is in everyone’s best interest.

Making your own maps is not a big undertaking anymore, but for developers not familiar with web mapping, the agony of choice might be intimidating. You want to make maps, but don’t know where to start nor which tools to use. I am here to help.

Here, I’ll discuss several of the best available tools, providing a brief overview of each, along with code examples, and weighing the pros and cons.

Java, a sophisticated programming language, has been dominating a number of ecosystems for quite a while. Portability, automated garbage collection, and its gentle learning curve are some of the things that make it a great choice in software development. However, like any other programming language, it is still susceptible to developer mistakes.

This article explores the top 10 common mistakes Java developers make and some ways of avoiding them.

Toptal engineer Jurgens du Toit looks at the possibility of using Logstash to regain control of your inbox and make your error emails manageable again, all without changing a single thing in your app.

Logstash can effectively leverage the power of Elasticsearch and Amazon SNS to streamline email notifications and save time.

Although the most wide-spread and supported way of running Django is on a Linux system (e.g., with uwsgi and nginx), it actually doesn’t take much work to get it to run on IIS. In this article, Toptal Engineer Ivan Voras walks you through a step-by-step tutorial, clearly explaining how to install Django on IIS.

A business rules engine is a tool for executing business rules. Business rules are composed of facts and conditional statements. Any “if-then” statement that appears in traditional business logic qualifies as a business rule.