Toptal Engineering Blog

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.

We’ll explore the application of parameterization and how it relates to mainstream design patterns such as dependency injection, strategy, template method, and others. In Python, many of these are made unnecessary by the fact that parameters can be callable objects or classes.

Most continuous deployment (CD) systems test code before rolling it out—but there’s a better way. Learn how to use Kubernetes to build an easily extendable event-driven CD pipeline that is optimized for reliable test results.

One of the best ways to elevate your status as a WordPress developer, at least in the eyes of your clients, is to become skilled at writing API consumers.

In this article, Toptal Freelance WordPress Developer Scott Fennell guides you through five techniques that will help you create powerful WordPress API clients to perfectly suit your needs.

Join an expert in a look back in horror at his most embarrassing mistakes in his early days as a WordPress developer. He discusses general PHP bugs, WordPress-specific bugs, and also mistakes made at a managerial level while supervising other developers.

When your app’s next iteration is ready to deploy, you have two choices: either stop the entire application and deploy the new version manually every time or build an automated zero downtime CI/CD deployment pipeline once.

In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Gaurav Kohli demonstrates the latter using the Jenkins-powered continuous deployment pipeline of a three-tier web application built in Node.js, deployed on AWS Cloud, and using Terraform as an infrastructure orchestrator.

Data warehouses aren’t exactly a new concept, but industry demand for data science services, coupled with the rise of AI and machine learning, is making them more relevant than ever.

In this post, Toptal Data Warehouse Developer Chamitha Wanaguru outlines three basic principles you need to keep in mind when developing a new data warehouse.

The de facto standard for web application security is the Open Web Application Security Project’s Top 10 Project. It lists the ten most prevalent security threats based on an extensive amount of data and community feedback and was updated in late 2017.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Full-stack and System Security Developer Hrvoje Gazibara discusses the changes to the OWASP Top 10’s most recent revision by illustrating new vulnerabilities, and even some that were removed.