Toptal Engineering Blog

Writing an application is only part of the story. In order for it to be of value, it needs deploying somewhere it can scale; it has to run with high availability, have backups, and so on. Deployment and infrastructure management isn’t a simple process. And Terraform does nothing to hide the complexity. However, it does make your infrastructure declarative and reproducible, like your code.

In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Radosław Szalski teaches us what Terraform is, how its components work, and how to configure an entire AWS Cloud solution in minutes using its configuration language.

Node 8 has brought significant performance and feature upgrades. Should you use it on new projects? Is it worth upgrading existing codebases? In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Youssef Sherif gives a tour of Node 8’s biggest changes and what they mean for your project.

Entity Framework is a great tool, but in some cases its performance is slow. One such case arises when complex queries use “Contains.”

Join Toptal .​NET Developer Anton Shkuratov in exploring how performance issues can be mitigated and finding the best approach to this type of complex queries.

Solidity is the programming language of choice for Ethereum and the de facto industry standard for smart contract development.

In the second article of our three-part series, Toptal Blockchain Developer John R. Kosinski takes a closer look at Solidity quirks and features, explaining how to make the most of it.

If you’re searching for the holy grail of bug-free code in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Swift, and/or Scala, look no further! This monad tutorial by Toptal Freelance Functional Programmer Alexey Karasev takes you from category theory to the practical implementations of the Option/Maybe, Either, and Future monads, plus a sample program—in all five languages.

Oracles are changing the way we view and create smart contracts. How do we implement them in Ethereum, using nothing but Solidity and standard dev tools?

In the first article of our three-part series, Toptal Blockchain Developer John R. Kosinski explains how to get started and compile a smart contract with oracles.

Traditionally, connecting devices for peer-to-peer communications has been a tedious task: An application needs to discover what’s around it, open connections on both sides, and then maintain them as network infrastructure, connections, distances, etc. Realizing the difficulties inherent in these activities, in iOS 7 and macOS 10.10 Apple introduced its MultipeerConnectivity framework.

Join Toptal Freelance iOS Developer Ben Gottlieb as he explains what MultipeerConnectivity is, and teaches us how to use it.

Let’s face it, robots are cool. In this post, Toptal Engineer Nick McCrea provides a step-by-step, easy-to-follow tutorial (with code samples) that walks you through the process of building a basic autonomous mobile robot.

The humble ERC20 token specification has become the de facto standard for Ethereum tokens. If you come across an Ethereum smart contract, chances are it’s ERC20-compliant.

In this guide, Toptal Freelance Ethereum Developer Gilad Haimov demonstrates how you can create and deploy your own ERC20 token in under an hour.

The existence of RESTful APIs is a popular myth in web development—but it’s a myth we can work with. The right tools can help keep documentation consistent and streamline automated testing. In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Alexander Zinchuk explores several time-saving approaches to developing REST APIs, with examples in Node.js and Ruby on Rails.

There are two dominant patterns of implementation for inversion of control. Which one is better, and is there a middle path to be found between them? How should you approach IoC to get the most out of your code?

Join Toptal Java Developer Martin Coll in exploring the familiar and unknown landscape of IoC development.

Manually gathering information about user-generated data is time-consuming, to say the least. That’s why more organizations are turning to automatic sentiment analysis methods—but basic models don’t always cut it. In this article, Toptal Freelance Data Scientist Rudolf Eremyan gives an overview of some sentiment analysis gotchas and what can be done to address them.

The Raspberry Pi is a little computer that you can get for as low as USD $5 and on which you can run many different types of software and build many different projects. In this article, I’m going to guide you through the process of setting it up as a home development server and deploying a full-stack JavaScript application that you can access from outside your network. This is great for setting up your own remote digital workspace, or simply to have control over the hardware you use for development.

Uploading a video to YouTube seems like a simple enough task, but non-existent documentation and unmaintained libraries can make even the simplest of tasks seem daunting.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Django Developer Ivan Carmo da Rocha Neto guides you through how to post YouTube videos from your Django app.

ClojureScript and its multiparadigm approach (with an emphasis on functional programming) may sound esoteric to some front-end developers. But it’s amazing to work with, and getting started with it is far simpler than one might imagine. In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Clojure Developer Luke Tomlin shows off some key features, getting straight into a React demo using Reagent and the Hiccup syntax.

Moving to a microservices architecture often raises the question: What is the best environment to stabilize services? Here’s how and why you should use Kubernetes, Docker, and CircleCI to containerize and deploy apps.