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.

authors 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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authors 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.

WordPress Continuous Deployment and Version Control with Bitbucket

WordPress developers spent years struggling with sub-optimal solutions for CI/CD. Despite the fact that they were using the most popular CMS on the market, they often had to improvise and resort to time-consuming practices.

In this article, Toptal WordPress Developer Alexa Green shares her approach to WordPress deployment using Bitbucket and some straightforward code.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Alexa Green

A veteran web developer, Alexa focuses on WordPress, Shopify, and React to create everything from landing pages to sophisticated storefronts.

Working with ESP32 Audio Sampling

The successor of the revolutionary ESP8266, the ESP32 is a next-generation microcontroller. Find out how to sample its analog-to-digital converter (ADC) from a timer interrupt using the Arduino IDE.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Ivan Voras, PhD

Ivan has 18+ years’ experience, ranging from back-end and blockchain architecture to DBA ops, kernel development, and embedded software.

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Caching and Connection Handling in .NET: An Aspect-Oriented Programming Tutorial

We reduce boilerplate with common OOP patterns, but often, the code overhead of using patterns is almost the same—if not bigger—than if we’d used boilerplate code in the first place.

In aspect-oriented programming tutorial, we implement two functions (aspects) that allow for generic database connection management and caching. These allow us to mark methods that, when called, will automatically have the required functionally present in through IL weaving.

12 minute readContinue Reading

Marko Pađen

Marko has over a decade of experience with large-scale software including architecture, design, coding, testing, documentation, and release.

An Array of Possibilities: A Guide to Ruby Pattern Matching

Pattern matching is a powerful tool commonly found in functional programming languages. The Ruby 2.7 release is going to include this feature.

In this article, Toptal Ruby Developer Noppakun Wongsrinoppakun provides a breakdown of what this addition will include and why it matters.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Noppakun Wongsrinoppakun

Noppakun is a Tokyo-based full-stack software engineer with extensive experience using Vue.js and Ruby on Rails.

Single sign-on is great for users, sparing them from memorizing yet another password; for businesses, removing frictio; and for developers, since less code means less things that can go wrong.

In this Flask login tutorial, we’ll write a step-by-step guide to add a SSO login button into a Flask application with SimpleLogin and Facebook as an identity provider.

6 minute readContinue Reading

Son Nguyen Kim

Son is highly skilled with software engineering and ML algorithms and always tries hard to tackle problems with a simple approach.

What CSS Developers Do and Why You Need One

Most websites today rely on CSS to deliver more style and polish, but the sheer popularity of CSS is causing many people to take it for granted and overlook its importance.

In this article, Toptal UI Developer Silvestar Bistrović explains this disconnect and outlines why you need a true CSS specialist rather than a jack of all trades.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Silvestar Bistrović

Silvestar is a web developer, CSS craftsman, WordPress theme expert, and JAMstack enthusiast. He enjoys creating fast, streamlined sites.

Oracle to SQL Server and SQL Server to Oracle Migration Guide

Migrating in either direction between Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database? There are some significant pitfalls to be aware of…

11 minute readContinue Reading

Leonid Draginsky

Leonid has 20+ years as a multi-platform developer and DBA, with special expertise in Oracle and SQL Server cross-platform migrations.

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.