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.

A Deeper Meaning: Topic Modeling in Python

Colloquial language doesn’t lend itself to computation. That’s where natural language processing steps in. Learn how topic modeling helps computers understand human speech.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Federico Albanese

Federico is a developer and data scientist who has worked at Facebook, where he made machine learning model predictions. He is a Python expert and a university lecturer. His PhD research pertains to graph machine learning.

Unity AI Development: A Finite-state Machine Tutorial

Ever wonder how game developers deliver entertaining interplay with the non-player characters they create? Learn how to develop them yourself in our finite-state machine tutorial.

12 minute readContinue Reading

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.

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TypeScript vs. JavaScript: Your Go-to Guide

Considering you can include as much plain JavaScript as you like in your TypeScript project, what factors should you consider when choosing TypeScript for your application? Let’s explore.

10 minute readContinue Reading

Daniele Monesi

Daniele is a full-stack developer and cloud solution architect who has worked with many software environments, such as Java-based back ends, Angular- and React-based front ends, and serverless or hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Thanks to rapid advances in technology, large amounts of data generated on social networks can be analyzed with relative ease, especially for those who use the R programming language and Gephi.

9 minute readContinue Reading

Juan Manuel Ortiz de Zarate

Juan is a developer, data scientist, and doctoral researcher at the University of Buenos Aires where he studies social networks, AI, and NLP. Juan has more than a decade of data science experience and has published papers at ML conferences, including SPIRE and ICCS.

How to Approach SVG Animations in CSS

Animations make websites look more polished and exciting, and help improve user experience. Explore how the combined potential of SVG and CSS can be leveraged to create animations without relying on external libraries.

14 minute readContinue Reading

Filip Defar

Filip is a web developer with expertise in highly interactive front-end applications. He helped build data visualizations for several BI products while working for companies such as AlignAlytics and Captario.

Serve Map Clusters 50x Faster Using Smarter Caching

Serving map clusters to a mobile app can cause a significant performance bottleneck. Fortunately, it’s a problem that can be solved with this caching strategy.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Florian Pfisterer

Florian is a back-end software engineer who has architected and scaled several apps and REST APIs on AWS using Redis, SQL, and Node.js. He was the lead software engineer at Playsports after it acquired a startup he had co-founded.

Control Your Climate With This Raspberry Pi Thermostat Tutorial

Smart homes are the future, but what do you do if you have an old air conditioner or heater in your home? Replacing old devices isn’t always feasible, but you can automate them with a Raspberry Pi.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Ovidiu-Nicu Andrei

Ovidiu-Nicu is a full-stack developer with extensive experience in PHP, JavaScript, and Linux administration. He has developed a number of WordPress plug-ins, large-scale apps, and performance-optimized MySQL procedures.

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.