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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No-Fuss AI for Your App: Meet Salesforce Einstein

The AI revolution is transforming the consumer world. Some developers may shy away from AI, which has traditionally been a heavily technical specialty. In this article, Toptal Freelance Salesforce Developer Fahad Munawar Khan explores how accessible to developers the AI cloud has become, even for non-Salesforce apps, with Salesforce Einstein.

8-minute readContinue Reading
Fahad Munawar Khan

Fahad Munawar Khan

Fahad is a Salesforce Certified Force.com Developer and web developer since 2011, including being a senior dev for clients like Honeywell.

Front-end Frameworks: Solutions or Bloated Problems?

Modern front-end frameworks constantly require you to download an entire development environment, complete with dependencies, and compile your code before even trying to view it on your browser. Is this something good? Is it the problem we are building more complex sites, or the frameworks are complex on their on own and they introduce an unnecessary level of complexity.

14-minute readContinue Reading
Juan Carlos Arias Ambriz

Juan Carlos Arias Ambriz

Juan is a front-end engineer, developer, and architect with over a decade of experience in UX development. He has collaborated with high-profile clients, including Meta, where his commitment to enhancing UX produced world-class responsive designs, e-commerce platforms, and interactive applications.

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Fastlane: iOS Automation on Cruise Control

Working on an iOS application can be tedious, especially when you are wasting countless hours doing the most boring tasks: taking screenshots, signing code, and jumping through similar hoops to get your app to the users’ devices.

In this article, Toptal Freelance iOS Developer Francisco Reynolds walks you through the ultimate release automation tool for your iOS app and shows how it can save you from all of the tedious tasks.

6-minute readContinue Reading
Francisco Reynolds

Francisco Reynolds

Francisco is a technical lead with extensive experience in iOS, Node.js, and web project development.

Magento 2: Revision or Revolution?

Magento 2 was initially greeted with skepticism, but the maturity of the next generation of Magento development has brought on an explosion of new users. In this article, Toptal Freelance Magento Developer Vivek Khatri explains why it’s the top choice for eCommerce sites, new and old.

10-minute readContinue Reading
Vivek Khatri

Vivek Khatri

Vivek is a Magento-certified developer who specializes in creating reliable, scalable e-commerce platforms tailored to client business needs, combining technical expertise with a strong focus on user experience and functionality.

Getting Started with the Elm Programming Language

Elm is a purely functional, strongly typed, reactive, and event-driven web client language. It takes a step back from the norms and really changes the way you reason about and program web application front-ends.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vuk Djapic takes you through the exotic concepts of Elm and its pros and cons in real world use.

16-minute readContinue Reading
Vuk Djapic

Vuk Djapic

Vuk has a Master’s degree in IST and a decade-plus of full-stack development in Java and JavaScript, including advanced algorithms.

GraphQL vs. REST: A GraphQL Tutorial

You might have heard about the new kid around the block: GraphQL. If not, GraphQL is, in a word, a new way to fetch APIs, an alternative to REST.

10-minute readContinue Reading
Amaury M

Amaury M

Amaury’s MSc/MEng degrees inform his full-stack work in web and mobile (Node.js, React, React Native) as well as blockchain app development.

Tips to Attract, Manage, and Retain Software Developers

What makes software developers tick? With this theme in mind, we will present some ways to retain employees that we have identified in successful software development teams.

10-minute readContinue Reading
Fernando Martinez

Fernando Martinez

Fernando is a veteran systems and computing engineer with 30 years of experience. He has developed in Java, C#, SQL Server, and more.

Getting Started With TensorFlow: A Machine Learning Tutorial

TensorFlow is more than just a machine intelligence framework. It is packed with features and tools that make developing and debugging machine learning systems easier than ever.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Dino Causevic gives us an overview of TensorFlow and some auxiliary libraries to debug, visualize, and tweak the models created with it.

19-minute readContinue Reading
Dino Causevic

Dino Causevic

Dino (BCS) has 6+ years in software development, specializing in back-end and security work using Java, Elasticsearch, .NET, and Python.

Quick Wins in the Enterprise With Salesforce AppExchange

AppExchange offers some solid wins for any company using Salesforce.

In this article, Freelance Salesforce Developer Fahad Munawar Khan explains how easy it is to get up and running with Salesforce AppExchange, and reveals some apps that are must-haves for any enterprise looking to boost their productivity.

5-minute readContinue Reading
Fahad Munawar Khan

Fahad Munawar Khan

Fahad is a Salesforce Certified Force.com Developer and web developer since 2011, including being a senior dev for clients like Honeywell.

From Solving Equations to Deep Learning: A TensorFlow Python Tutorial

TensorFlow makes implementing deep learning on a production scale a breeze. However, understanding its core mechanisms and how dataflow graphs work is an essential step in leveraging the tool’s power.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Oliver Holloway demonstrates how TensorFlow works by first solving a general numerical problem and then a deep learning problem.

10-minute readContinue Reading
Oliver Holloway

Oliver Holloway

Oliver is a versatile full-stack software engineer with more than 7 years of experience and a postgraduate mathematics degree from Oxford.

Test-driven React.js Development: React.js Unit Testing with Enzyme and Jest

Any piece of code that has no tests is said to be legacy code according to Michael Feathers. Therefore, one of the best ways to avoid creating legacy code is using test-driven development (TDD).

While there are many tools available to create unit tests in JavaScript, in this post, we will use Jest and Enzyme to create a React.js component with basic functionality using TDD.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Alonso Ayala Ortega

Alonso Ayala Ortega

Over the last decade, Alonso’s Oracle certifications and full-stack work have lately turned toward QA automation and sharp BDD solutions.

Create Data From Random Noise With Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks, among the most important machine learning breakthroughs of recent times, allow you to generate useful data from random noise. Instead of training one neural network with millions of data points, you let two neural networks contest with each other to figure things out.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Cody Nash gives us an overview of how GANs work and how this class of machine learning algorithms can be used to generate data in data-limited situations.

13-minute readContinue Reading
Cody Nash

Cody Nash

As a data scientist, Cody has used tools including Python and R to explore and deploy analyses on genetic, healthcare and other data sets.

A Guide to Performance Testing and Optimization With Python and Django

Donald Knuth said that “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” But there comes a time, usually in mature projects with high loads, when the need to optimize presents itself. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Iulian Gulea talks about five common methods to optimize a web project’s code using principles that can be used in Django, as well as in other frameworks and languages. Using these principles, he demonstrates how to reduce the response time of a query from 77 to 3.7 seconds.

12-minute readContinue Reading
Iulian Gulea

Iulian Gulea

Iulian is a software engineer with experience developing web projects of all sizes, from simple sites to complex SaaS products. Previously a full-stack developer for PepsiCo, Iulian has worked both individually and in teams for companies large and small.

Intro to Magento: Navigating the Top E-commerce Ecosystem

In this article, Toptal Freelance Magento Developer Daniel Cuevas Zamora gives a broad overview of one of the most popular eCommerce platforms and how to get started with it.

5-minute readContinue Reading
Daniel Cuevas Zamora

Daniel Cuevas Zamora

Daniel is a senior certified Magento developer with experience working with Laravel and Zend frameworks and various JavaScript frameworks.

Get Started With IoT Development: An ESP8266 Arduino Tutorial

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer John R. Kosinski will demonstrate a simple Amazon Alexa hack using quintessential Arduino skills and basic hardware.

17-minute readContinue Reading
John R. Kosinski

John R. Kosinski

As a full-stack dev for nearly two decades, John’s worked with IoT, Blockchain, web, and mobile projects using C/C++, .NET, SQL, and JS.

Broad vs. Narrow Skillsets: Software Engineering Skills Demystified

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Tiberius Florea outlines the difference between deep and broad skillsets and explains why broadening your skillset may further your career.

5-minute readContinue Reading
Tiberius Florea

Tiberius Florea

Tiberius is an award-winning full-stack developer who has worked for Google. He also interned at Facebook and Microsoft.

Toptal Engineering Expert

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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