Toptal Engineering Blog

Wikipedia describes Reactive Programming as “an asynchronous programming paradigm concerned with data streams and the propagation of change,” but what is it really?

In this article, Toptal Freelance WPF Developer Denis Jesus Gonzalez Sanchez demonstrates a WPF app using ReactiveUI with the MVVM pattern and uses it to access a REST API.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs, originally developed by Facebook for internal use. Since its public release, GraphQL has been compared to REST and other architectures.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Marcos Henrique da Silva demonstrates how to create a GraphQL Node.js API, and explains why you should try it, too.

Static websites are simple and fast, but it’s also possible to automate updates to them to keep them fresh and relevant. Find out how to generate daily-updated HTML pages that track the latest releases of popular GitHub repositories.

You can just write sequentially executed code in JavaScript, but should you?

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Omar Waleed tests the widespread Node.js belief that synchronous code degrades performance and is, in a sense, just plain evil. Is this really true?

T9 predictive text has been around for ages, and it lost relevance with the advent of modern smartphones. However, T9 can still be a useful addition to certain types of apps on iOS.

In this article, Toptal Swift Developer George Vashakidze explains why T9 can still be useful and practical, and how you can add it to your next iOS app.

Cross-platform mobile apps are increasingly being built with React Native. But how can you scan for QR codes and augment the user’s camera view when they’re present?

The WebSocket protocol is one of the ways to make your application handle real-time messages. The most common alternatives are long polling and server-sent events.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Tomasz Dąbrowski shows us how to implement WebSockets with the Spring Boot framework, and use STOMP for effective client-server communication.

Updating live applications used to be a tedious and somewhat risky affair, but with the emergence of modern development frameworks and tools, updates and deployment are becoming straightforward.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Elene Latsoshvili explains how you can update a Laravel app with zero downtime, and how this can be done for most PHP applications.

Providing production support to an application is one of the most challenging aspects of software development. In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Flavio Pezzini shows us techniques that can prevent bugs and make finding issues in production much faster.

While components have been available in Angular since the beginning, they’re still easy to mess up with common mistakes like people not using them at all, creating components instead of attribute directives, and more.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Valters Valdersteins differentiates the correct and incorrect ways to use Angular components and illustrates them with examples.

Google’s Flutter mobile SDK only recently made it to version 1.0, but it is already catching up with React Native in terms of market share. Flutter is also used to develop apps for Google’s upcoming Fuchsia OS.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Nemanja Stosic demonstrates how to create a simple messaging app using Flutter and Firebase.

Automatically scaling container deployments in a microservices-based app architecture is downright luxurious…once it’s set up. But what’s the best way to tune an app’s orchestration parameters?

WordPress development relies on tried and tested technologies and techniques. This allows for good backward compatibility but also causes many developers to stick to legacy solutions for far too long.

In this article, Toptal WordPress Developer Stefano Ginella introduces us to the Roots stack and explains how it can help WordPress developers harness the latest front-end technologies.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network is an independent solution that’s heralded as the solution to bitcoin’s scaling problem by keeping fees minuscule and making transactions instant, away from the blockchain.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Blockchain Developer Amin Shah Gilani explores what the Bitcoin Lightning Network really is, how it can make the guarantees it provides, and its current state.

WordPress maintenance tends to be straightforward and some may even consider it mundane. However, this doesn’t mean you should take it lightly, as it can still consume a lot of time.

In this article, Toptal WordPress Developer Hassan Jamal outlines ten essential WordPress maintenance tips that could help you save hours of work and keep your websites up to date with relative ease.

When complex systems are life-critical, it can be extremely difficult to modernize and upgrade them safely. While many engineers will never work on such systems, there is much to be learned from those who do.

In this article, Toptal Solutions Architect Dr. Kyle Kotowick explains how to properly maintain and update systems that are too important to fail.