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.

Identifying the Unknown With Clustering Metrics

Clustering in machine learning has a variety of applications, but how do you know which algorithm is best suited to your data? Here’s how to amplify your data insights with comparison metrics, including the F-measure.

12 minute readContinue Reading

Surbhi Gupta

Surbhi is a data scientist and developer with expertise in machine learning and robotics. A former senior data science engineer at Utopia Global, her experience ranges across ML fields including NLP, computer vision, and OCR. She has a master’s degree in mechatronics, and has published research in the field of robotics and optimization.

Future-proof Your Android Code, Part 2: Functional Reactive Programming in Action

The functional reactive programming (FRP) paradigm is becoming increasingly mainstream. In this installment, we discuss FRP essentials like system design and libraries, and implement a sample application.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Iliyan Germanov

Iliyan is an Android developer and CTO who has founded four startups and created several top-rated apps, including Ivy Wallet, which has received 10 YouTube tech community “best UI/UX” awards. He specializes in functional programming, UX, Kotlin, and Haskell.

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The Foundations of Functional Reactive Programming in Android

This tutorial explores the mathematical concepts behind two key programming paradigms, functional programming and reactive programming, so you can build long-lasting Android architecture.

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Iliyan Germanov

A .NET Programmer’s Guide to CancellationToken

Microsoft created a standardized cancellation implementation that has far-reaching capabilities beyond its original use case.

7 minute readContinue Reading

Davit Asryan

Davit is a software engineer who has a broad range of experience in creating enterprise software for companies, including Veritas. His expertise is developing with .NET and C#.

.NET on Linux: Simpler Than It Seems

Discover Microsoft .NET’s cross-platform development capabilities by building a Dockerized ASP.NET and Entity Framework application on Linux.

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Zablon Dawit

Zablon is a full-stack web developer specializing in ASP.NET and JavaScript. He has created enterprise software for various companies, including Pelmorex Corp and S.R.E Software Development.

The 10 Most Common JavaScript Issues Developers Face

At first, JavaScript may seem quite simple. Yet the language is significantly more nuanced, powerful, and complex than one would initially be led to believe. Many of JavaScript’s subtleties lead to a number of common problems—10 of which we discuss here—that keep code from behaving as intended. It’s important to be aware of and avoid these pitfalls in one’s quest to become a master JavaScript developer.

13 minute readContinue Reading

Ryan J. Peterson

Ryan is an architect, entrepreneur, and developer. He is skilled in building cloud-scalable, extensible software systems.

Unity AI Development: An xNode-based Graphical FSM Tutorial

Take your Unity AI game to the next level with xNode. In this tutorial, we boost our FSM-based AI with a graphical user interface, delivering an enhanced development environment.

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Garegin Tadevosyan

Garegin is an accomplished Unity and C# game developer. He created a networking protocol for gamified playground equipment, served as the CTO of an educational gaming startup, and was a game developer on a multinational social-casino team.

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.