Toptal Engineering Blog

Writing reusable code that can be shared across multiple platforms can make developing mobile applications a lot easier. But, how do you do that without paying the usual cost of maintainability, ease of testing, and poor user experience that comes with cross-platform mobile application development?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Emran Bajrami walks us through Xamarin and shows us techniques for building high-quality cross-platform apps.

Security has always been a primary concern for database experts, and with the advent of new, decentralized services, it’s become even more crucial. Microsoft addressed the need for an added level of security in SQL with the introduction of Always Encrypted functionality in SQL Server 2016.

In this blog post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Josip Saban explains how Microsoft’s Always Encrypted concept works, how it’s implemented, and why developers can’t afford to ignore it.

Consistent Hashing is a distributed hashing scheme that operates independently of the number of servers or objects in a distributed hash table. It powers many high-traffic dynamic websites and web applications.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Juan Pablo Carzolio will walk us through what it is and how hashing, distributed hashing and consistent hashing work.

If there is something every front-end developer wants, it is proper support for variables in CSS. For years, to work around this missing feature, developers have resorted to CSS preprocessors. However, all that changes with the introduction of CSS custom properties.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Nicolás J. Engler walks us through CSS custom properties and shows us how they can be used to make better, more dynamic stylesheets.

Learn how, with the right remote worker security policy, distributed teams can be just as secure as in-house teams.

Toptal Freelance Software Engineer and full-time remote worker Amin Shah Gilani walks us through common security attack methods, cyber defense strategies, and, finally, an example of a good remote worker security policy.

Internationalizing modern apps, where the front-end and the back-end are distinctly separate from one another, can be a little tricky. AngularJS, with the help of a few tools, makes internationalizing your app a breeze.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Mehmet Bajin gives us a step-by-step tutorial to internationalizing and localizing AngularJS apps.

In this tutorial, we will look at some common mistakes that are often made by Django developers and ways to avoid them. This tutorial is useful even if you’re a skilled Django developer because these mistakes aren’t just limited to new developers taking their first stab at Django.

PhalconPHP will make your high-load application fast and easy, it’s one of the fastest MVC frameworks for PHP available. It’s written in C and supplied as a compiled PHP extension, so it doesn’t need to be interpreted at every request. Consider PhalconPHP for your next project, you won’t regret it.

Deploying new features with Salesforce can be problematic in more ways than one. It is crucial to have a sound strategy governing the publication of new releases, without running the risk of breaking your product.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Ajinkya Deshmukh will provide you with all relevant information and key tips that will allow you to manage your next Salesforce release smoothly.

Magento built a reputation as an e-commerce market leader, all thanks to its ease of use and customizability. Getting into the framework was only made easier with the release of Magento 2.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Gabriel Queiroz Silva gives us a step-by-step tutorial to building your first Magento 2 website.

Fat controllers and models: an inevitable problem for most large-scale projects based on MVC frameworks such as Yii and Laravel. Fortunately, there’s a cure, and it’s in architecting a layered structure.

Natural language is increasingly becoming a viable way of interacting with smart software. Google search, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, etc. are all capable of understanding queries in natural language.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun (Sean) Wang walks us through some useful concepts and techniques in natural language processing and shows how they can be used to build a simple NLP app.

Many problems have optimal algorithms developed for them, while many others require us to randomly guess until we get a good answer. Even an optimal solution becomes slow and complex at a certain scale, at which point we can turn to natural processes to see how they reach acceptable results.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Eugene Ossipov walks us through the basics of creating a Genetic Algorithm and gives us the knowledge to delve deeper into solving any problems using this approach.

Although CSS was meant to deal with styling, creating extraordinary layouts on the web has always been a unique challenge and almost always required the developer to resort to JavaScript. However, Flexbox is here to change that.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Diego Díaz walks us through the basics of Flexbox and some cool examples of how Flexbox can be used to build smart CSS-only layouts.

Java’s open source Spring framework is a popular tool for creating high performing applications using plain old Java objects, but as with any tool, inappropriate use can lead to trouble. In this article, we cover the most common pitfalls of using the Spring framework so new and experienced developers alike have a roadmap of what to avoid.

Java has some idiosyncrasies of its own and design choices that can make it rather verbose. While Java is a mature and performant programming language, developers frequently need to write boilerplate code that bring little or no real value other than complying with some set of constraints and conventions.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Miguel García López shows how Project Lombok can help dramatically reduce the amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written in a Java application.