Toptal Engineering Blog

Modern mobile application development requires a well thought-out plan for keeping user data in sync across various devices. This is a thorny problem with many gotchas and pitfalls, but users expect the feature and expect it to work well. For iOS and macOS, Apple provides a robust toolkit, called CloudKit API, which allows developers targeting Apple platforms to solve this synchronization problem.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Paul Young demonstrate how to use CloudKit to keep a user’s data in sync between multiple clients.

Automated software tests are critically important to the long-term quality, maintainability, and extensibility of software projects, and for Java, JUnit is the path to automation.

While most of this article will focus on writing robust unit tests and utilizing stubbing, mocking, and dependency injection, Toptal Software Engineer Josh Hayden will also discuss JUnit and integration tests.

For a while, WordPress seemed to had fallen behind. As the web became more reliant on JavaScript to create immersive, interactive experiences, it became increasingly clear that WordPress needed to offer new ways for users and developers to interact with its content.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Developer Brian Coords explores the amazing new features of WordPress’s REST API, showing why WordPress is still on the cutting edge of web development.

Whether you’re a bootstrapped startup that needs a brochureware website or a corporation that needs a high-performing web app, this post is for you. In it, Toptal Software Engineer Amin Shah Gilani teaches you how to setup a static, SSL-secure website for the very low cost of free, using Github Pages and Cloudflare.

Could you be using Git more efficiently?

The answer is probably a resounding “Yes,” which is why Toptal Software Engineer Ursula Clarke wrote today’s post.

In it, she teaches you how to use git stash, git reset, git bisect, git squash, and git rebase for maximum productivity.

So you’ve implemented user authentication. Now, you want to allow your users to log in with Twitter, Facebook or Google. No problem. You’re only a few lines of code away from doing so.

But while there are hundreds of OAuth 2 packages that pip knows, only a few actually do what they’re supposed to do.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Peter Goodspeed-Niklaus explains how to integrate OAuth 2 into your Django or Django Rest Framework using Python Social Auth.

Freelancer identity theft happens all the time. In fact, someone’s likely had their identity stolen as you read these words. Let’s hope it wasn’t you.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Relja Damnjanovic shares his story about freelancer identity theft and offers lessons for freelancers, who don’t want to learn things the hard way.

In this tutorial, you will learn how automated testing works for the iOS platform and how to implement it in your project.

It’s every developer’s dream to be more efficient. In this article, you’ll learn how one engineer saved himself from typing more than 20,000 characters over six months and prevented 1,000 bugs in the process.

The Ionic project is rapidly gaining in popularity and is one of the most popular open source projects worldwide. With the recent announcement of the stable version of Ionic 2, this is the perfect time to underscore the Ionic 2 and its predecessor.

In this post, Toptal software engineer Julien Renaux outlines the major changes Ionic 2 brought to the platform and explains how to put these new features to good use.

C is often called a middle-level computer language as it combines the elements of high-level languages with the functionalism of assembly language. C allows the manipulation of bits, bytes, and addresses - giving the programmer more control over exactly how the program will behave and a more direct access to the mechanics of the underlying hardware.

C was created, influenced, and field tested by working programmers. The end result is that C gives the programmer what the programmer wants.

C++ is an enhanced version of the C language. C++ includes everything that is part of C and adds support for object-oriented programming (OOP). In addition, C++ also contains many improvements and features that make it a “better C”, independent of object oriented programming.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Martin Gouws explains advanced features of the Node Package Manager that should be in every JavaScript developer’s knowledge base.

On every new project, you have the privilege of deciding how you’ll architect the app and organize the code. But if you don’t pay attention, or you rush through coding, you risk ending up with spaghetti code. The solution? Use a proper design pattern.

In this tutorial, Toptal Software Engineer Dino Bartošak explains how to implement an MVVM design pattern on a demo Swift application.

While the success of your project depends on many factors, one of the most common reasons projects fail is a lack of management or downright bad project management.

In this post, Lead Engineering Editor Demir Selmanovic teaches you the basics of Agile project management using Kanban and Trello.

Freelancers work flexible hours, but this convenience comes at a price: They have to manage their time better than on-site professionals. However, it also means they’re free to optimize their routine and achieve exceptional efficiency.

In this post, software engineer Dmitry Ryazantsev will guide you through the ins and outs of personal time management, leaving little to chance. What good are great rates if you waste hours each week?

In back-end software development, increased productivity often comes at the cost of performance. In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Eduardo Bautista shows us how the Phoenix framework builds on the familiar concepts from the Rails world, and makes it even easier to build robust concurrent applications without compromising performance.

In an ever growing ecosystem of rich and complicated JavaScript applications, there’s more state to be managed than ever before: the current user, the list of posts loaded, etc.Managing state can be hard and error prone, but immutability and Redux- a predictable state container for JavaScript apps- can help significantly.

In this article, Toptal Programmer David Xu talks about managing state using immutability with Redux, a predictable state container.

The Webpack module bundler processes JavaScript code and all static assets, such as stylesheets, images, and fonts. However, configuring Webpack and its dependencies can be cumbersome and not always a straightforward process, especially for beginners.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Andrej Gajdos provides a guide with examples on how to configure Webpack for different scenarios and points out the most common pitfalls connected to project dependencies and their bundling when using Webpack.

Making your website or web app available to a wider audience often requires it to be available in multiple languages. For non-English projects, you can increase your audience by releasing it in English as well as your native language. Internationalizing and localizing your project, however, becomes a much easier process if you start during its infancy.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Igor Gomes dos Santos shows us how to leverage simple tools, like Gettext and Poedit, to internationalize and localize a PHP project.

Since the inception of the platform, Android developers have had pretty much only one option for a database: SQLite. Although feature-rich and powerful, it wasn’t quite what Android app developers needed. Realm, a modern, efficient database solution for mobile platforms, turned out to be an amazing replacement for SQLite on Android.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Mateus Gondim Romão Batista explains why you should use Realm for your next Android application.

PostCSS is the hot new tool that’s making the rounds on the front-end side of web development. It has been quickly and widely adopted, and possibly will have a significant impact on how we base our present-day CSS.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Nicolás J. Engler introduces us and guides us on how to start using this tool, expand it with plugins, or integrate with other CSS processors, task runners, or bundlers.