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.

Featured in

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.

How to Build a React Native QR Scanner: An RNCamera Tutorial

Cross-platform mobile apps are increasingly being built with React Native. But how can you scan for QR codes and augment the user’s camera view when they’re present?

6 minute readContinue Reading

Bassam Seif

Having founded multiple startups and worked with Microsoft, Bassam specializes in highly scalable, full-stack JavaScript applications.

Using Spring Boot for WebSocket Implementation with STOMP

The WebSocket protocol is one of the ways to make your application handle real-time messages. The most common alternatives are long polling and server-sent events.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Tomasz Dąbrowski shows us how to implement WebSockets with the Spring Boot framework, and use STOMP for effective client-server communication.

8 minute readContinue Reading

Tomasz Dąbrowski

Tomasz has 10+ years of experience with Java apps, and worked for companies like Hewlett-Packard, as well as Silicon Valley startups.

World-class articles, delivered weekly.

By entering your email, you are agreeing to our privacy policy.

Laravel Zero Downtime Deployment

Updating live applications used to be a tedious and somewhat risky affair, but with the emergence of modern development frameworks and tools, updates and deployment are becoming straightforward.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Elene Latsoshvili explains how you can update a Laravel app with zero downtime, and how this can be done for most PHP applications.

7 minute readContinue Reading

Elene Latsoshvili

Elene is a full-stack developer with 12+ years of experience. She’s language/stack agnostic, but her primary fields are Java and JavaScript.

7 Debugging Techniques To Speed Up Troubleshooting in Production

Providing production support to an application is one of the most challenging aspects of software development. In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Flavio Pezzini shows us techniques that can prevent bugs and make finding issues in production much faster.

6 minute readContinue Reading

Flavio Pezzini

Flavio has worked on complex projects for several multinational, multicultural companies such as Dell, IBM, and Deutsche Bank.

Angular Components 101: An Overview

While components have been available in Angular since the beginning, they’re still easy to mess up with common mistakes like people not using them at all, creating components instead of attribute directives, and more.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Valters Valdersteins differentiates the correct and incorrect ways to use Angular components and illustrates them with examples.

11 minute readContinue Reading

Valters Valdersteins

Valters is a senior programmer with many years of experience working in companies and on projects of varying size and scope.

Flutter Tutorial: How to Create Your First Flutter App

Google’s Flutter mobile SDK only recently made it to version 1.0, but it is already catching up with React Native in terms of market share. Flutter is also used to develop apps for Google’s upcoming Fuchsia OS.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Nemanja Stosic demonstrates how to create a simple messaging app using Flutter and Firebase.

9 minute readContinue Reading

Nemanja Stošić

Nemanja has worked for startups and corporations, notably Microsoft. He’s an Agile/Scrum expert and has worked as a team lead and mentor.

Do the Math: Scaling Microservices Applications With Orchestrators

Automatically scaling container deployments in a microservices-based app architecture is downright luxurious…once it’s set up. But what’s the best way to tune an app’s orchestration parameters?

9 minute readContinue Reading

Antoine Hamon

Antoine has done DevOps for microservice architectures since Docker was in beta and helped design the ecosystem for Cryptobox.

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.