Toptal Engineering Blog

It’s no secret that the WordPress codebase is a mess. Many developers use its legacy code as an excuse for writing sloppy code themselves, even if its newer additions follow best practices. If this is you, it’s time to level up your skills!

In the past few years, we’ve seen the introduction of a lot of new technologies in JavaScript, but we needed time to see how the market was going to adopt them.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Alejandro Hernandez takes a look at how popular JavaScript is becoming and the factors that may have affected this popularity, and he tries to predict what the future of JavaScript will look like.

Commercial solvers such as Gurobi are playing an increasingly important role in optimization, and they tend to boast more features than open-source solutions.

In this article, Toptal Python Developer Sean Wang explains how you can integrate the HorusLP package with Gurobi’s API to harness its most advanced features.

SQL window functions are calculation functions similar to aggregate functions but, unlike normal aggregate functions like “group by,” have access to individual rows and can even add some of their attributes into the result set.

In this article, Toptal Freelance SQL Developer Neal Barnett explains the benefits of SQL functions, describes when you’d use them, and gives you real examples to help with the concepts.

Unit testing sometimes sounds like an unnecessary expense, but it is a powerful, yet simple tool. Unit tests allow you to identify and rectify weaknesses with relatively little effort. In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Nickolas Fisher takes you on a quick tour of unit testing and explains why you can’t have too many unit tests.

A functional specification is a high-level design document created before implementation and serves as a true plan for the team.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Ruby Developer Alec Ten Harmsel walks us through prototyping an algorithm and creating a functional specification with the help of AsciiDoc and R for a Ruby on Rails project.

What do you do when you come across a dataset that’s simply too big to allow fast queries? Google BigQuery could be part of the solution, though it’s no silver bullet.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Maksym Goroshkevych explains how BigQuery can drastically improve query performance, and when you should and should not use it.

The increasing accuracy of machine learning systems has resulted in a flood of applications using them. As machine learning models matured and improved, so did ways of attacking them.

In this article, Toptal Python Developer Pau Labarta Bajo examines the world of adversarial machine learning, explains how ML models can be attacked, and what you can do to safeguard them against attack.

Building a mobile app isn’t cheap—and the harsh reality is that most apps fail. Find out how to leverage fundamental analytics metrics to make sure your app actually turns a profit.

Flask is a great way to get up and running quickly with a Python applications, but what if you wanted to make something a bit more robust?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Python Developer Ivan PoleschyuI shares some tips and useful recipes for building a complete production-ready Flask application.

There are a number of ways of implementing animated full-screen layouts with a large degree of human interaction, and many developers would resort to a JavaScript plugin to save time.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Stefan Vitasovic demonstrates how you can do it using nothing but CSS and JavaScript, without including a bloated library or plugin in your project.

Types and testable code are two of the most effective ways of avoiding bugs. In this tutorial, discover TypeScript best practices while you create a Discord bot from scratch.

Swift is great, but what if your application relies on a library that’s written using C++? Luckily Objective-C++ is here to save the day.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Swift Developer Josip Bernat integrates C++ code with Swift by using wrapper classes as a bridge and then creates an app that recognizes the Toptal logo using OpenCV.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs and can be used to query data from a server while also allowing clients to specify exactly what data is needed.

Toptal Freelance Developer Christopher Moore explains how to create a GraphQL server using the Laravel Framework along with walking through some examples including querying relationships, mutations, and authentication.

DevOps is an oft-misunderstood buzzword, seen as a trendy must-have in the form of technologies, tools, and staff to acquire. But it’s much more, yet much simpler, than that.

With a static site generator back end in place from Part 1, now it’s time to implement a Gatsby.js-based front end, host it on Netlify, and get AWS to activate the whole pipeline.