Toptal Engineering Blog

Machine Learning, in computing, is where art meets science. Perfecting a machine learning tool is a lot about understanding data and choosing the right algorithm. But why choose one algorithm when you can choose many and make them all work to achieve one thing: improved results.

More and more people are moving their work from desktop applications to the cloud using an equivalent online web application. However, this has unfortunately not been true for software development IDEs. Although there have been some attempts to provide an online IDE, they have not come anywhere close to traditional IDEs.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michele Sciabarra guides us on how to build a cloud-based development environment for Scala and big data applications, with the help of Docker in Amazon AWS.

Although database programming does not evolve at nearly the same pace as traditional application programming, recent advancements in several fields are bringing new techniques and technologies within the reach of small and independent developers.

In this guide, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jeffrey Shumaker explains how developers can quickly and easily tap these methods to identify database issues they may not even be aware of, and how they can build excellent data mining tools without spending a lot on expensive software licenses.

Manual memory management is a nightmare that programmers have been inventing ways to avoid since the invention of the compiler. Programming languages with garbage collectors make life easier, but at the cost of performance.

In this article, Toptal engineer Peter Goodspeed-Niklaus gives us a peek into the history of garbage collectors and explains how notions of ownership and borrowing can help eliminate garbage collectors without compromising their safety guarantees.

EhCache is a widely used, pure Java cache that can be easily integrated with most popular Java frameworks, such as Spring and Hibernate. It is often considered to be the most convenient choice for Java applications since it can be integrated into projects easily. EhCache Spring Annotations allows seamless integration into any Spring application by simply adding annotations to cacheable methods without modifying the method implementations. This article focuses on boosting your Spring applications with EhCache Spring Annotations.

Google Cardboard was envisioned as the cheapest Virtual Reality (VR) solution on the planet, and at this point, nothing else comes close in terms of pricing. However, the low price did not bring about mass adoption, and Google’s Android-based VR platform is nothing more than a tech curiosity at this point.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic leverages his extensive experience in the graphics industry to explain what’s keeping Cardboard VR down, and what the platform needs to attract more users, investment, and development.

Java Virtual Machine (JVM), the powerful virtual machine behind programming languages like Java and Scala, provides a platform-independent environment for executing compiled bytecode. Programming languages built for the JVM can be used to write programs that can run on a wide range of platforms without modification and can even leverage all the libraries and frameworks that exist for the JVM.

In this article, Toptal engineer Federico Tomassetti presents an overview of the strategy and various tools involved in creating our very own programming language for the JVM.

In this article, Toptal engineer Ivan Voras provides a useful overview and comparison of multi-processing network server models, with the goal being to take some of the mystery out of writing high performance networking code. The article is intended for “system programmers”, i.e., back-end developers who will work with the low-level details of their applications, implementing network server code.

Although the old, standardized security approaches work with REST services, they all have problems that could be avoided by using a better standard. For this, JWT arrives just in time to save the day.

In this article, Toptal engineer Dejan Milosevic guides us on how to implement a JWT token-based REST API using Java and Spring Security.

Nowadays, almost all Python frameworks use WSGI as a means, if not the only means, to communicate with their web servers. This is how Django, Flask, and many other popular frameworks do it.

This article intends to provide readers with a glimpse into how WSGI works and allow them to build a simple WSGI application or server.

The Dependency Injection Container in Symfony2 allows components to be injected with their dependencies, and is often used as a Service Locator, which when combined with the DI-container pattern is considered to be an anti-pattern by many.

In this article, Toptal engineer Vasilii Lapin shows us how you can build a simple Symfony2 application using the DI-container, but without implementing the Service Locator pattern.

Developers often work on only one machine, and have their whole development environment on that machine. Testing database replication before deploying changes in this kind of a development environment can be a challenging task.

In this article, Toptal engineer Ivan Bojovic guides us through a step-by-step tutorial on how to implement MySQL master-slave replication on one machine.

Handling all validation in domain objects results in objects that are huge and complex to work with. In domain-driven design, using decoupled validator components allows your code to be much more reusable and enables validation rules to rapidly grow.

In this article, Toptal engineer Josip Medic shows us how validation can be decoupled from domain objects, made context-specific, and structured well to achieve more sustainable validation code.

Integrating social network login in web applications directly using their SDKs can be a time consuming task. The fact that these SDKs keep changing every now and then doesn’t help either.

In this article, Toptal engineer Son Nguyen Kim provides us with an in-depth tutorial on how to use Satellizer, a feature-rich AngularJS library to integrate Facebook Login in an AngularJS web app.

Are we really going to need $500 phones to get people in developing countries on 3G or 4G? Not really.

Welcome to the world of commoditised smartphones. Allow us to explain what’s going on and why it could have a significant impact on software and hardware industries.

In this tutorial, Toptal Engineer Orban Botond demonstrates how to use the Grape gem – a REST-like API micro-framework for Ruby – to build backend support in Rails for a JSON API. Grape is designed to run as a mountable rack engine that complements your web applications without interfering with them.