Toptal Engineering Expert
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.
Featured in
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.

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.

Leonid Draginsky
Leonid has 20+ years as a multi-platform developer and DBA, with special expertise in Oracle and SQL Server cross-platform migrations.
World-class articles, delivered weekly.
By entering your email, you are agreeing to our privacy policy.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
Most-read Articles

An Angular 5 Tutorial: Step by Step Guide to Your First Angular 5 App
World-class articles, delivered weekly.
Toptal Developers
- Android Developers
- App Developers
- AWS Developers
- Azure Developers
- BigCommerce Developers
- Blockchain Developers
- Coders
- Database Developers
- Embedded Software Engineers
- Flutter Developers
- HTML5 Developers
- Java Developers
- Joomla Developers
- Kubernetes Developers
- Laravel Developers
- Magento Developers
- .NET Developers
- Next.js Developers
- Odoo Developers
- Outsourced Developers
- PHP Developers
- Power BI Developers
- Prototype Developers
- Python Developers
- React Developers
- React Native Developers
- Remote Developers
- Ruby on Rails Developers
- Salesforce Developers
- Security Engineers
- SharePoint Developers
- Shopify Developers
- Software Developers
- Squarespace Developers
- Startup Developers
- Svelte Developers
- Twilio Developers
- Vue.js Developers
- Web Developers
- Web Scrapers
- WooCommerce Developers
- WordPress Developers
- View More Freelance Developers
Join the Toptal® community.