Toptal Engineering Blog

The Toptal Engineering Blog is a hub for in-depth development tutorials and new technology announcements created by professional software engineers in the Toptal network.

Toptalauthors are vetted experts in their fields and write on topics in which they have demonstrated experience. All of our content is peer reviewed and validated by Toptal experts in the same field.
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Toptalauthors are vetted experts in their fields and write on topics in which they have demonstrated experience. All of our content is peer reviewed and validated by Toptal experts in the same field.

How to Set Up a Microservices Architecture in Ruby: A Step-by-Step Guide

Microservices are one of the latest trends in software design. In a microservices architecture, the classic monolithic back-end is substituted by a suite of distributed services. This design allows better separation of responsibilities, easier maintenance, greater flexibility in the choice of technologies for each service, and easier scalability and fault tolerance.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Francisco Temudo guides us in a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a microservices suite using Ruby.

16 minute readContinue Reading
Francisco Temudo

Francisco Temudo

Francisco’s 15+ years in software development (including PHP & Java) have lately been focused on full-stack web development (Ruby & JS.)

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.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Radek Ostrowski

Radek Ostrowski

Radek is a blockchain engineer with an interest in Ethereum smart contracts. He also has extensive experience in machine learning.

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An Informal Introduction to DOCX

With approximately one billion people using Microsoft Office, the DOCX format is the most popular de facto standard for exchanging document files between offices.

While DOCX is a complex format, you may want to parse it manually for simpler tasks such as indexing, converting to TXT and making other small modifications. I’d like to give you enough information on DOCX internals so you don’t have to reference the ECMA specifications, a massive 5,000 page manual.

12 minute readContinue Reading
Stepan Yakovenko

Stepan Yakovenko

Stepan is an experienced software developer with extensive experience working in C++, Java, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, and C#.

ARM Servers: Mobile CPU Architecture For Datacentres?

Boring. That’s a word many people use to describe the server industry, although unexciting and uneventful would be a better fit. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because when something “exciting” happens to a server, it usually involves blue smoke and downtime. Luckily, the server space is about to get a bit more exciting, thanks to the introduction of servers based on ARM processors.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor and resident chip geek Nermin Hajdarbegovic explains why ARM processors could end up powering a server near you, and what this means for the software industry. The potential implications of ARM servers are huge, but there is no cause for alarm. This industry segment does not tend to evolve fast, and developers will have plenty of time to get ready.

16 minute readContinue Reading
Nermin Hajdarbegovic

Nermin Hajdarbegovic

As a veteran tech writer, Nermin helped create online publications covering everything from the semiconductor industry to cryptocurrency.

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.

6 minute readContinue Reading
Necati Demir, PhD

Necati Demir, PhD

Necati holds a PhD degree in Machine Learning and has 14 years of experience in software development.

Developing for the Cloud in the Cloud: BigData Development with Docker in AWS

More and more people are moving their work from desktop applications to the cloud using an equivalent online web application. However, this has unfortunately not been true for software development IDEs. Although there have been some attempts to provide an online IDE, they have not come anywhere close to traditional IDEs.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michele Sciabarra guides us on how to build a cloud-based development environment for Scala and big data applications, with the help of Docker in Amazon AWS.

14 minute readContinue Reading
Michele Sciabarra

Michele Sciabarra

Michele is a system architect with over 20 years of experience. He is a polyglote developer but his specialty is Scala and DevOps.

Guide To Budget-friendly Data Mining

Although database programming does not evolve at nearly the same pace as traditional application programming, recent advancements in several fields are bringing new techniques and technologies within the reach of small and independent developers.

In this guide, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jeffrey Shumaker explains how developers can quickly and easily tap these methods to identify database issues they may not even be aware of, and how they can build excellent data mining tools without spending a lot on expensive software licenses.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Jeffrey Shumaker

Jeffrey Shumaker

Jeff’s experience covers every aspect of database design. He has been a database manager for small IT and Fortune 500 companies.

Toptal Engineering Expert

Gabriel Courtemanche

Gabriel is a highly efficient and reliable professional who possesses a broad skill set for web application development. He's been working on a range of products and clients—from working on scalability problems in production engineering teams at Shopify and Autodesk to launching new applications for startups. Most of his work consists of leading technical teams, by creating an easy development environment, fixing technical debts, providing best practices code examples, and mentoring devs.
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Previously At

Shopify

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Marcos Henrique da Silva

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