Toptal Engineering Blog

In the past few years, we’ve seen the introduction of a lot of new technologies in JavaScript, but we needed time to see how the market was going to adopt them.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Alejandro Hernandez takes a look at how popular JavaScript is becoming and the factors that may have affected this popularity, and he tries to predict what the future of JavaScript will look like.

Commercial solvers such as Gurobi are playing an increasingly important role in optimization, and they tend to boast more features than open-source solutions.

In this article, Toptal Python Developer Sean Wang explains how you can integrate the HorusLP package with Gurobi’s API to harness its most advanced features.

SQL window functions are calculation functions similar to aggregate functions but, unlike normal aggregate functions like “group by,” have access to individual rows and can even add some of their attributes into the result set.

In this article, Toptal Freelance SQL Developer Neal Barnett explains the benefits of SQL functions, describes when you’d use them, and gives you real examples to help with the concepts.

Unit testing sometimes sounds like an unnecessary expense, but it is a powerful, yet simple tool. Unit tests allow you to identify and rectify weaknesses with relatively little effort. In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Nickolas Fisher takes you on a quick tour of unit testing and explains why you can’t have too many unit tests.

A functional specification is a high-level design document created before implementation and serves as a true plan for the team.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Ruby Developer Alec Ten Harmsel walks us through prototyping an algorithm and creating a functional specification with the help of AsciiDoc and R for a Ruby on Rails project.

What do you do when you come across a dataset that’s simply too big to allow fast queries? Google BigQuery could be part of the solution, though it’s no silver bullet.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Maksym Goroshkevych explains how BigQuery can drastically improve query performance, and when you should and should not use it.

The increasing accuracy of machine learning systems has resulted in a flood of applications using them. As machine learning models matured and improved, so did ways of attacking them.

In this article, Toptal Python Developer Pau Labarta Bajo examines the world of adversarial machine learning, explains how ML models can be attacked, and what you can do to safeguard them against attack.