Toptal Engineering Blog

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Piotr Gaczkowski explains how to make the most out of command line tools and lists some of the best tools out there.

Apache JMeter and REST Assured are two very popular Java-based tools for automated testing of REST API services.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Nemanja Veskovic gives us an overview of the pros and cons of both of these tools and shows where they fit best in your existing REST API projects.

Non-Salesforce app developers may be overlooking a hidden gem in the AI world: Salesforce Einstein offers image recognition and text analysis for plain-vanilla apps and Salesforce apps alike. In this article, Toptal Freelance Salesforce Developer Fahad Munawar Khan shows how any any developer can leverage Einstein Vision and Einstein Language.

Asynchronous programming used to be a challenge even for seasoned professionals, leading to aptly named phenomena like Callback Hell.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Demir Selmanovic explains how async functions took us out of purgatory and why you should be using them.

Fragment caching in Rails provides an easy yet a powerful way of improving your application’s performance. However, some real-world scenarios do not work quite well with how the Rails cache behaves by default.

In this article, Toptal Ruby on Rails Developer Orban Botond shows how you can implement a small DSL to optimize how the cache for related entities is invalidated to improve template rendering performance.

Designing systems integration architecture can be a difficult task. And it gets worse if you’re designing for software at scale. An enterprise service bus can be one way of working around the challenges. But this is definitely not the simplest of solutions.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Anton Goncharov gives us a detailed overview of the challenges of systems integration and a guide to addressing those challenges with Apache Camel.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Neven Pičuljan introduces you to the intricacies of deep learning in hedge funds and finance in general.

In a recent project, there were several programmatic tasks I needed to repeat periodically. One task in particular involved updating user-level permissions based on evidence of membership level purchase or subscription.

Instead of going into the admin panel and manually deleting hundreds (maybe thousands) of subscriptions, I opted to reach for one of my favorite WordPress tools: WP-CLI, which fixed the problem in a few keystrokes.

The AI revolution is transforming the consumer world. Some developers may shy away from AI, which has traditionally been a heavily technical specialty. In this article, Toptal Freelance Salesforce Developer Fahad Munawar Khan explores how accessible to developers the AI cloud has become, even for non-Salesforce apps, with Salesforce Einstein.

Modern front-end frameworks constantly require you to download an entire development environment, complete with dependencies, and compile your code before even trying to view it on your browser. Is this something good? Is it the problem we are building more complex sites, or the frameworks are complex on their on own and they introduce an unnecessary level of complexity.

Working on an iOS application can be tedious, especially when you are wasting countless hours doing the most boring tasks: taking screenshots, signing code, and jumping through similar hoops to get your app to the users’ devices.

In this article, Toptal Freelance iOS Developer Francisco Reynolds walks you through the ultimate release automation tool for your iOS app and shows how it can save you from all of the tedious tasks.

Magento 2 was initially greeted with skepticism, but the maturity of the next generation of Magento development has brought on an explosion of new users. In this article, Toptal Freelance Magento Developer Vivek Khatri explains why it’s the top choice for eCommerce sites, new and old.

Elm is a purely functional, strongly typed, reactive, and event-driven web client language. It takes a step back from the norms and really changes the way you reason about and program web application front-ends.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vuk Djapic takes you through the exotic concepts of Elm and its pros and cons in real world use.

You might have heard about the new kid around the block: GraphQL. If not, GraphQL is, in a word, a new way to fetch APIs, an alternative to REST.

What makes software developers tick? With this theme in mind, we will present some ways to retain employees that we have identified in successful software development teams.

TensorFlow is more than just a machine intelligence framework. It is packed with features and tools that make developing and debugging machine learning systems easier than ever.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Dino Causevic gives us an overview of TensorFlow and some auxiliary libraries to debug, visualize, and tweak the models created with it.

AppExchange offers some solid wins for any company using Salesforce.

In this article, Freelance Salesforce Developer Fahad Munawar Khan explains how easy it is to get up and running with Salesforce AppExchange, and reveals some apps that are must-haves for any enterprise looking to boost their productivity.

TensorFlow makes implementing deep learning on a production scale a breeze. However, understanding its core mechanisms and how dataflow graphs work is an essential step in leveraging the tool’s power.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Oliver Holloway demonstrates how TensorFlow works by first solving a general numerical problem and then a deep learning problem.

Any piece of code that has no tests is said to be legacy code according to Michael Feathers. Therefore, one of the best ways to avoid creating legacy code is using test-driven development (TDD).

While there are many tools available to create unit tests in JavaScript and, in this post, we will use Jest and Enzyme to create a React.js component with basic functionality using TDD.

Generative adversarial networks, among the most important machine learning breakthroughs of recent times, allow you to generate useful data from random noise. Instead of training one neural network with millions of data points, you let two neural networks contest with each other to figure things out.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Cody Nash gives us an overview of how GANs work and how this class of machine learning algorithms can be used to generate data in data-limited situations.

Donald Knuth said that “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” But there comes a time, usually in mature projects with high loads, when the need to optimize presents itself. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Iulian Gulea talks about five common methods to optimize a web project’s code using principles that can be used in Django as well as other frameworks and languages. Using these principles, he demonstrates how to reduce the response time of a query from 77 to 3.7 seconds.