Toptal Engineering Blog

There’s no question that user experience is impacted by perceived load times. With today’s heavier front ends, client-side rendering doesn’t feel very fast. In this article, Toptal Freelance Front-end Developer Guillaume Breux compares client-side, server-side, and pre-rendering strategies to help you choose the best option for your own app.

Angular 6 is out! The most outstanding changes are in its CLI and how services get injected. In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Angular Developer Joaquin Cid goes over the basic steps of initial setup and then creates a small diary app using Material Design for the front end and Firebase for the back end.

Will AI improve our lives beyond comparison, or will it steal our jobs and destroy humanity?

In this article, Toptal AI expert Necati Demir, PhD, moves past the evil artificial intelligence of science fiction to discuss the current algorithm-based prediction AI, the economics of AI, and the economic benefits of artificial intelligence.

The Ethereum Name Service is a blockchain-backed alternative to the internet’s traditional Domain Name System. If you own a .eth domain, you can deploy smart contracts that let users set up their own subdomains—but then, of course, you’ll want a corresponding ĐApp to make it user-friendly. In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Ethereum Developer Radek Ostrowski provides complete coverage of this scenario, this time with a focus on ĐApp development.

Static websites offer a host of advantages over dynamic pages in many scenarios, but they can be impractical and tedious to maintain.

In this, Toptal Front-end Developer Silvestar Bistrovic demonstrates how the four most popular static page generators can help.

Hybrid mobile apps may have their limitations, but often it’s well worth the boost in cross-platform consistency and development speed. Apps made with Apache Cordova in particular can further leverage existing web developer skills through the use of Cordova frameworks. This tutorial compares Ionic with Framework7.

Leveraging DeepMind’s breakthrough AI approaches takes some work, but the results are astounding. In this article, Toptal Freelance Deep Learning Engineer Neven Pičuljan guides us through the building blocks of reinforcement learning, training a neural network to play Flappy Bird using the PyTorch framework.

Continuous integration using nothing but Apple tools used to be tedious and time-consuming. This changed with the launch of Xcode 9.0 last September.

In this article, Toptal iOS Developer Nemanja Stosic explains how you can harness the potential of new Xcode features to streamline iOS development.

Despite initial skepticism, React Native is very much in demand today!

In this article, Toptal Freelance React Native Developer, and former React Native skeptic, Alexander Pataridze talks about why he became a React Native advocate instead and introduces us to the technology by illustrating four use-cases.

The Protein Data Bank (PDB) bioinformatics database is the world’s largest repository of experimentally-determined structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies. All data is gathered using experimental methods such as X-ray, spectroscopy, crystallography, NMR, etc. This article explains how to extract, filter, and clean data from the PDB to make it suitable for further analysis.

CSS is notorious for getting messy quickly as a website scales. While frameworks like Bootstrap can help, SMACSS takes a different approach, as a set of solid organizational guidelines. In this article, Toptal Freelance Front-end Developer Slobodan Gajic gives us a run-down of the idea and benefits behind Jonathan Snook’s architectural wisdom.

Employing Python to make machine learning predictions can be a daunting task, especially if your goal is to create a real-time solution. However, Tensorflow and Scikit-Learn can significantly speed up implementation.

In this article, Toptal Python Developer Guillaume Ferry outlines a simple architecture that should help you progress from a basic proof of concept to a minimal viable product without much hassle.

Many businesses use SharePoint but use it poorly. Restructuring and re-education are the keys to getting the most out of SharePoint. In this article, Toptal Freelance SharePoint Developer Anthony Lucidi explores how features like metadata tags, SharePoint workflows, and PowerApps can make a world of difference.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Nick Chikovani shows how easy it is to perform web scraping using a headless browser. Specifically, he provides a Puppeteer tutorial, going through a few examples of how to control Google Chrome to take screenshots and gather structured data.

How do you approach machine learning problems? Are neural networks the answer to nearly every challenge you may encounter?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Python Developer Peter Hussami explains the basic approach to machine learning problems and points out where neural may fall short.

Hot module replacement is one of the most useful features offered by Webpack. It allows all kinds of modules, including JSON, CSS, and JS files, to be updated at runtime without needing a full refresh.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Shaojiang Cai demonstrates how to use Hot Module Replacement in Redux.