Web Front-end

How do you define good code? Is it 100% test coverage, or is it backwards compatibility with decade-old hardware? We may not be able to reach an end to this debate yet, but good software always seems to conform to a few certain qualities of code.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Zachary Goldberg walks us through six simple ideas that can help you make better, more maintainable software.

As a result of smartphones and mobile applications becoming so popular, web developers have been looking for ways to create mobile applications using JavaScript. This increased demand has led to the development of many JavaScript frameworks capable of running native-like applications on mobile devices.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Johannes Stein compares the current two most popular choices for mobile-oriented JavaScript frameworks, Cordova and React Native. Examining their advantages and pitfalls, he dives into details of each and compares them across different disciplines.

Testing frameworks such as Testify, Ginkgo, and Gomega can streamline testing for Golang applications, however, some of the most efficient and effective tools for testing can be found in Go’s standard libraries. In this article, Toptal developer Gabriel Aszalos covers the basics of testing in Go, from table testing to JSON response assertion.

When dealing with web-based projects that run in the production environment, being able to build and deploy changes quickly is a top priority. However, repetitive processes such as building front-end assets, when not automated, can be prone to critical errors.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Anton Kanevsky shows us how Gulp can solve various challenges of build automation through simple JavaScript routines.

Many product owners don’t have a technical background and thus often find themselves unprepared and scrambling when it comes to bringing on a new development team. This often results in hindered progress, wasted time, and frustration for everyone involved. If this sounds like it could be you, either now or in the future, then you should be somewhat concerned.

In this blog post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Carlos Ramirez III will walk you through the various steps of a typical transition process in project management so you can prepare for this eventuality and make the transition as smooth as possible.

“So much of what’s new and exciting about Angular 2 is its new way of thinking rather than its new architecture,” says Toptal Freelance Developer Ethan James.

In this article, Ethan walks through the inner workings of a simple Angular 1.5 app and then shows us how to upgrade it to Angular 2 while giving us the necessary understanding to truly appreciate it.

Meet Web Audio API, a powerful programming interface for controlling audio on the web. Gone are the days when the web browser could rarely play a sound file correctly. With this API, you can now load sound from different sources, apply effects, create visualizations, and do much more.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Joaquín Aldunate shows us how to unleash our inner musician using Web Audio API with the Tone.js framework by giving us a brief overview of what this API has to offer and how it can be used to manipulate audio on the web.

Ever tried to create a JSON data structure that includes entities with bidirectional relationships? If you have, you know that this often results in errors or exceptions being thrown.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Nirmel Murtic provides a robust working approach to avoiding these errors when creating JSON structures that included entities with bidirectional (i.e., circular) relationships.

How many times have you used the find-and-replace functionality (or RegEx) across a directory to make changes to JavaScript source files? Up your refactoring game by using codemods, scripts used to rewrite other scripts.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Jeremy Greer walks us through three common uses of codemods, using the toolkit “jscodeshift.”

Nowadays, front-end development workflows involve many modern tools and preprocessors that not only streamline the whole process, but also allow you to spend less time on common web tasks, giving you more time to focus on other aspects of the project that require more careful and skilled insight. Sass, the scripting language for syntactically awesome stylesheets, comes with robust and built-in support for mixins - an essential feature for keeping your stylesheets DRY.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Justin Brazeau shows us 10 useful Sass mixins that help keep your stylesheets manageable by breaking them into smaller reusable bits, each with its own focus.

Would you like to test your PHP code like a boss? Do you feel that basic unit tests and PHPUnit just don’t cut it anymore? If your answer to both questions is yes, you might want to try Codeception, a mature and well-documented testing framework designed to outperform PHPUnit and Behat.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vasily Koval describes how he came to take the plunge and start using Codeception, and he explains why you should check out Codeception for your PHP testing needs.

Software engineers are always searching for the best tools and guides to help them be more productive and allow them to spend less time reading long technical specifications.

Today, Toptal is pleased to present a new resource to the community: the JavaScript Cheat Sheet - ES6 and Beyond. Toptal’s JavaScript Cheat Sheet is a quick, easily understandable reference guide. It is free to download and includes all the new and exciting features introduced with ES6 as well as the future experimental features from ES7.

Today, writing applications in languages that compile to JavaScript is a very common practice. Scala developers, for example, can use Scala.js and have the same language for both the server and the client. That said, Scala’s compiler and standard dependency management tools are too limiting in the modern JavaScript world.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michele Sciabarra shows us how to integrate Scala.js with the plethora of JavaScript modules available on NPM, using tools like Browserify, and explains how to do this without even having to install Node.js.

When building smaller websites, the way developers structure their CSS code is usually not a big issue. However, when it comes to larger, more complex projects, code organization becomes crucial.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Tomislav Matijević introduces us to BEM methodology and explains how this CSS practice can massively improve code maintainability, speed up the development process, and streamline the teamwork of developers by arranging CSS classes into independent modules.

Streams are a powerful construct in Node.js and in I/O driven programming in general. Gulp, a tool for task automation, leverages streams in elegant ways to allow developers to enhance their build workflow.

In this article, Toptal engineer Mikhail Angelov gives us some insight into how Gulp works with streams by showing us step-by-step how to build a Gulp-like build automation tool.

When dealing with time consuming, resource intensive tasks, most PHP developers are tempted to choose the “quick hack route”. We’ve all used “ini_set(‘max_execution_time’, HUGE_INT);” before, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

In today’s tutorial, PHP developer Daniel Gheorghe demonstrates how an application’s user experience may be improved by separating long-running tasks from the main request flow using Laravel.