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.

authors 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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authors 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.

Haxe Review: Haxe 4 Features and Strengths

The quietly growing number of serious Haxe projects have something new to contend with: the first major compiler release in over three years. What does Haxe 4 bring to the table?

10 minute readContinue Reading

Kevin Bloch

Kevin has more than 25 years among full-stack, desktop, and indie game development. He lately specializes in PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Perl, and Haxe.

WebVR and the Browser Edge Computing Revolution

Virtual Reality (VR) is making inroads into various industries but is not mainstream yet. WebVR and edge computing have the potential to boost adoption and bring VR to a wider audience.

In this series of articles, Toptal Full-stack Developer Michael Cole introduces you to the basics of WebVR and edge computing, complete with elaborate examples.

10 minute readContinue Reading

Michael Cole

Michael is an expert full-stack web engineer, speaker, and consultant with over two decades of experience and a degree in computer science.

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Optimizing Website Performance and Critical Rendering Path

Does your web page’s rendering performance meet today’s standards? Bad rendering performance can translate into a relatively high bounce rate.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Web Developer Ilya Chernov explores the things that can lead to high rendering times, and how to fix them.

7 minute readContinue Reading

Ilya Chernov

Ilya is an accomplished engineer with over five years of experience working on remote and onsite teams, as well as leading other developers.

Choosing a Tech Stack Alternative - The Ups and Downs

If a web application is big and old enough, there may come a time when you need to break it down into smaller, isolated parts and extract services from it. Some of these will be more independent than others.

In this post, Toptal Full-stack Developer Viktar Basharymau explains how his team extracted an app from the monolithic Rails application that powers Toptal, and how the new service’s technical stack was selected.

11 minute readContinue Reading

Viktar Basharymau

Viktar is a seasoned developer with strong analytical skills. He has production experience in Ruby, JS, C#, and Java, and is adept at FP.

Maintain Control: A Webpack/React Tutorial, Pt. 1

When starting a new React project, you have many templates to choose from. These templates are able to support application development at a very large scale. But they leave the developer experience and bundle output saddled with various defaults, which may not be ideal.

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Michael Pontus

Michael is a senior full-stack developer specializing in front-end development with React and TypeScript.

Case Study: Why I Use AWS Cloud Infrastructure for My Products

As a platform for running complex and demanding software products, AWS offers flexibility by using resources only when needed and scaling on demand.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Tomislav Capan explains why he uses AWS and what provisioned infrastructure can do for clients.

12 minute readContinue Reading

Tomislav Capan

Tomislav is a veteran software engineer, technical consultant, and architect. He specializes in highly scalable full-stack applications.

Oracle to SQL Server and SQL Server to Oracle Migration Guide - Pt. 2

Migrating in either direction between Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database? This round of pitfalls to avoid includes coverage of sequences, identity columns, and filtered indexes.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Leonid Draginsky

Leonid has 20+ years as a multi-platform developer and DBA, with special expertise in Oracle and SQL Server cross-platform migrations.

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.