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.

WebVR Part 5: Design and Implementation

With all building blocks in place, it is time to wrap up our WebVR journey and demonstrate how everything is implemented.

In the last part of our WebVR series, Toptal Full-stack Developer Michael Cole goes over design and implementation in detail, explaining how the experience comes together.

15-minute readContinue Reading
Michael Cole

Michael Cole

Michael is an expert full-stack web engineer, speaker, and consultant with over two decades of experience and a degree in computer science.

Oracle to SQL Server and SQL Server to Oracle Migration Guide - Pt. 3

Migrating in either direction between Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database? Code migration tools, public synonyms, and change management are important to keep in mind.

14-minute readContinue Reading
Leonid Draginsky

Leonid Draginsky

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

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Maintain Control: A Guide to Webpack and React, Pt. 2

In a React/Webpack development scenario, there are myriad options to choose from. It’s worth exploring some advanced techniques when it comes to TypeScript, CSS, web workers, and service workers.

8-minute readContinue Reading
Michael Pontus

Michael Pontus

Michael is a senior full-stack developer specializing in front-end development with React and TypeScript.

WebVR Part 4: Canvas Data Visualizations

Unlock the mysteries of the canvas component for your own visualizations. We have completed the simulation math, and now it’s time for some creative play.

In Part 4 of our WebVR series, we use the canvas element to make three rapid iterations to visualize the gravitational orbits of the planets in our simulation.

9-minute readContinue Reading
Michael Cole

Michael Cole

Michael is an expert full-stack web engineer, speaker, and consultant with over two decades of experience and a degree in computer science.

How to Approach Wrappers for Swift Properties

A property wrapper is a generic structure that encapsulates read and write access to the property and adds additional behavior to it. We use it if we need to constrain the available property values, add extra logic to the read/write access (like using databases or user defaults), or add some additional methods.

In this article, Toptal Freelance iOS Developer Alexander Gaidukov demonstrates Swift 5.1’s new @propertyWrapper annotation—a more elegant solution.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Aleksandr Gaidukov

Aleksandr Gaidukov

Alexander has more than nine years of experience developing applications and over five years with the iOS platform—both iPhone and iPad.

WebVR Part 3: Unlocking the Potential of WebAssembly and AssemblyScript

What if you could incorporate clever features from other programming languages for your JavaScript project, without too much hassle? That is the general idea behind WebAssembly.

In Part 3 of our WebVR series, Toptal Full-stack Developer Michael Cole introduces you to WebAssembly and AssemblyScript, outlining how they can be harnessed to create a browser-backend for web apps.

10-minute readContinue Reading
Michael Cole

Michael Cole

Michael is an expert full-stack web engineer, speaker, and consultant with over two decades of experience and a degree in computer science.

WebVR Part 2: Web Workers and Browser Edge Computing

WebVR is bringing virtual reality to our browsers, but how do we make sure we have enough computing power to deliver a good experience? How do we make the most of multi-core, hyperthreaded processors?

In part two of our series, Toptal Full-stack Developer Michael Cole explains the basics of browser edge computing and the role of web workers.

8-minute readContinue Reading
Michael Cole

Michael Cole

Michael is an expert full-stack web engineer, speaker, and consultant with over two decades of experience and a degree in computer science.

Haxe Review: Haxe 4 Features and Strengths

The quietly growing number of serious Haxe projects have something new to contend with: the first major compiler release in over three years. What does Haxe 4 bring to the table?

10-minute readContinue Reading
Kevin Bloch

Kevin Bloch

Kevin has more than 25 years among full-stack, desktop, and indie game development. He lately specializes in PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Perl, and Haxe.

WebVR and the Browser Edge Computing Revolution

Virtual Reality (VR) is making inroads into various industries but is not mainstream yet. WebVR and edge computing have the potential to boost adoption and bring VR to a wider audience.

In this series of articles, Toptal Full-stack Developer Michael Cole introduces you to the basics of WebVR and edge computing, complete with elaborate examples.

10-minute readContinue Reading
Michael Cole

Michael Cole

Michael is an expert full-stack web engineer, speaker, and consultant with over two decades of experience and a degree in computer science.

Optimizing Website Performance and Critical Rendering Path

Does your web page’s rendering performance meet today’s standards? Bad rendering performance can translate into a relatively high bounce rate.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Web Developer Ilya Chernov explores the things that can lead to high rendering times, and how to fix them.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Ilya Chernov

Ilya Chernov

Ilya is an accomplished engineer with over five years of experience working on remote and onsite teams, as well as leading other developers.

Choosing a Tech Stack Alternative - The Ups and Downs

If a web application is big and old enough, there may come a time when you need to break it down into smaller, isolated parts and extract services from it. Some of these will be more independent than others.

In this post, Toptal Full-stack Developer Viktar Basharymau explains how his team extracted an app from the monolithic Rails application that powers Toptal, and how the new service’s technical stack was selected.

11-minute readContinue Reading
Viktar Basharymau

Viktar Basharymau

Viktar is a seasoned developer with strong analytical skills. He has production experience in Ruby, JS, C#, and Java, and is adept at FP.

Maintain Control: A Webpack/React Tutorial, Pt. 1

When starting a new React project, you have many templates to choose from. These templates are able to support application development at a very large scale. But they leave the developer experience and bundle output saddled with various defaults, which may not be ideal.

11-minute readContinue Reading
Michael Pontus

Michael Pontus

Michael is a senior full-stack developer specializing in front-end development with React and TypeScript.

Case Study: Why I Use AWS Cloud Infrastructure for My Products

As a platform for running complex and demanding software products, AWS offers flexibility by using resources only when needed and scaling on demand.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Tomislav Capan explains why he uses AWS and what provisioned infrastructure can do for clients.

12-minute readContinue Reading
Tomislav Capan

Tomislav Capan

Tomislav is a veteran software engineer, technical consultant, and architect. He specializes in highly scalable full-stack applications.

Oracle to SQL Server and SQL Server to Oracle Migration Guide - Pt. 2

Migrating in either direction between Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database? This round of pitfalls to avoid includes coverage of sequences, identity columns, and filtered indexes.

8-minute readContinue Reading
Leonid Draginsky

Leonid Draginsky

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

Building Reactive Apps with Redux, RxJS, and Redux-Observable in React Native

While Redux is a great state management solution, it doesn’t support asynchronous behavior by default. A way around this is to use redux-observable, based on RxJS - a powerful library for reactive programming in JavaScript.

9-minute readContinue Reading
Sourabh Verma

Sourabh Verma

Sourabh has a broad and versatile skill set. His experience with mobile and back-end development enables him to build prototypes quickly.

Performance and Efficiency: Working with HTTP/3

HTTP/3 is on the horizon, but many aren’t even familiar with HTTP/2 yet. Find out what HTTP/3 means for web development, administration, and the internet.

15-minute readContinue Reading
Brian Wojtczak

Brian Wojtczak

Brian was a system administrator and network engineer before turning to software development in an effort to automate himself out of a job.

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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