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.

Building an Android POS App That Can’t Be Closed

It’s not every day that a client asks a developer to create a mobile app that cannot be closed, but this can be a crucial feature for Point of Sale (POS) devices.

In this article, Toptal Software Developer Tudor Filip Stupariu demonstrates how he built an Android POS app that can’t be closed.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Tudor Filip Stupariu

Tudor Filip Stupariu

Tudor is a full-stack software developer focused on JavaScript. He created numerous mobile and web apps, as well as server-side apps.

The Many Applications of Gradient Descent in TensorFlow

TensorFlow is one of the leading tools for training deep learning models. Outside that space, it may seem intimidating and unnecessary, but it has many creative uses—like producing highly effective adversarial input for black-box AI systems.

18 minute readContinue Reading
Alan Reiner

Alan Reiner

Alan’s ML expertise covers visual target recognition models for missile defense systems, real-time NLP, and financial evaluation tools.

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Using Kotlin for Back-end Development: A Quick Overview

Kotlin has features that make it an ideal language for back-end development. Learn what these features are and how you can use them to create high-performing systems.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Boldizsar Akos Mezei

Boldizsar Akos Mezei

Boldizsar is a Java/Scala back-end developer who has worked at Morgan Stanley on a group of microservices.

Modern Web Scraping With Python and Selenium

Web scraping has been around since the early days of the World Wide Web, but scraping modern sites that heavily rely on new technologies is anything but straightforward.

In this article, Toptal Software Developer Neal Barnett demonstrates how you can use Python and Selenium to scrape sites that employ a lot of JavaScript, iframes, and certificates.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Neal Barnett

Neal Barnett

Neal is a senior consultant and database expert who brings a wealth of knowledge and more than two decades of experience to the table.

SQL Indexes Explained, Pt. 1

Properly used, an SQL database index can be so effective that it might seem like magic. But the following series of exercises will show that underneath, the logic of most SQL indexes—and wielding them correctly—is quite straightforward.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Mirko Marović

Mirko Marović

Mirko designs and develops massive, extreme-workload databases. He also trains software developers on databases and SQL.

Don’t Build, Integrate: A Guide to CRM Integration

Customer Relationship Management systems provide businesses with more clarity and information about customer behavior, helping boost sales, retain existing customers, and attract new ones.

In this article, Toptal Software Developer Leif Gensert outlines the basic challenges of CRM integration and explains what you can do to make the process as efficient and frictionless as possible.

14 minute readContinue Reading
Leif Gensert

Leif Gensert

Leif has a decade of experience in back-end development using Ruby and Elixir. He’s worked for big consulting firms and startups alike.

Create a WhatsApp Chatbot, Not an App

Feedback on an enterprise web app prompted an experiment. Could a WhatsApp chatbot replace it? Would people like it better? Would it be more useful?

10 minute readContinue Reading
Aminadav Glickshtein

Aminadav Glickshtein

Aminadav has 20 years of professional experience. Having started coding at the age of seven, programming is like a native language to him.

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

Most-read Articles

Marcos Henrique da Silva

Creating a Secure REST API in Node.js

By Marcos Henrique da Silva
13 minute readContinue Reading

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