Toptal Engineering Blog

Static websites offer a host of advantages over dynamic pages in many scenarios, but they can be impractical and tedious to maintain.

In this, Toptal Front-end Developer Silvestar Bistrovic demonstrates how the four most popular static page generators can help.

Hybrid mobile apps may have their limitations, but often it’s well worth the boost in cross-platform consistency and development speed. Apps made with Apache Cordova in particular can further leverage existing web developer skills through the use of Cordova frameworks. This tutorial compares Ionic with Framework7.

Leveraging DeepMind’s breakthrough AI approaches takes some work, but the results are astounding. In this article, Toptal Freelance Deep Learning Engineer Neven Pičuljan guides us through the building blocks of reinforcement learning, training a neural network to play Flappy Bird using the PyTorch framework.

Continuous integration using nothing but Apple tools used to be tedious and time-consuming. This changed with the launch of Xcode 9.0 last September.

In this article, Toptal iOS Developer Nemanja Stosic explains how you can harness the potential of new Xcode features to streamline iOS development.

Despite initial skepticism, React Native is very much in demand today!

In this article, Toptal Freelance React Native Developer, and former React Native skeptic, Alexander Pataridze talks about why he became a React Native advocate instead and introduces us to the technology by illustrating four use-cases.

As patterns go, REST APIs are so useful and ubiquitous that every web developer, regardless of language or platform, should know how to build one.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Marcos Henrique da Silva shows how to create a simple and secure REST API for user management on Node.js.

The Protein Data Bank (PDB) bioinformatics database is the world’s largest repository of experimentally-determined structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies. All data is gathered using experimental methods such as X-ray, spectroscopy, crystallography, NMR, etc. This article explains how to extract, filter, and clean data from the PDB to make it suitable for further analysis.

CSS is notorious for getting messy quickly as a website scales. While frameworks like Bootstrap can help, SMACSS takes a different approach, as a set of solid organizational guidelines. In this article, Toptal Freelance Front-end Developer Slobodan Gajic gives us a run-down of the idea and benefits behind Jonathan Snook’s architectural wisdom.

Employing Python to make machine learning predictions can be a daunting task, especially if your goal is to create a real-time solution. However, Tensorflow and Scikit-Learn can significantly speed up implementation.

In this article, Toptal Python Developer Guillaume Ferry outlines a simple architecture that should help you progress from a basic proof of concept to a minimal viable product without much hassle.

Many businesses use SharePoint but use it poorly. Restructuring and re-education are the keys to getting the most out of SharePoint. In this article, Toptal Freelance SharePoint Developer Anthony Lucidi explores how features like metadata tags, SharePoint workflows, and PowerApps can make a world of difference.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Nick Chikovani shows how easy it is to perform web scraping using a headless browser. Specifically, he provides a Puppeteer tutorial, going through a few examples of how to control Google Chrome to take screenshots and gather structured data.

How do you approach machine learning problems? Are neural networks the answer to nearly every challenge you may encounter?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Python Developer Peter Hussami explains the basic approach to machine learning problems and points out where neural may fall short.

Hot module replacement is one of the most useful features offered by Webpack. It allows all kinds of modules, including JSON, CSS, and JS files, to be updated at runtime without needing a full refresh.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Shaojiang Cai demonstrates how to use Hot Module Replacement in Redux.

ASP.NET Core is a leaner and more modular redesign of ASP.NET 4.x.

In this article, Toptal Freelance ASP.NET Developer Damir Imangulov shows how to build a robust RESTful API using ASP.NET, EF Core, AutoMapper, and XUnit.

Crystal is an up and coming programming language that should appeal to Ruby veterans in demand for more performance and flexibility. It may even be the most promising programming language of 2018.

In this tutorial, Toptal Ruby Developer Eqbal Quran demonstrates how you can harness Crystal’s potential to create your own blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are popular topics, vast domains with multiple paradigms to solve any given challenge.

In this article, Toptal Machine Learning Expert Adam Stelmaszczyk walks us through implementing deep Q-learning, a fundamental algorithm in the AI/ML world, with modern libraries such as TensorFlow, TensorBoard, Keras, and OpenAI Gym.

Microsoft and Google have worked together since Angular 2, rendering ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC Razor obsolete. Nevertheless, while ASP.NET’s front-end tools may be lacking, it is still a great back-end framework.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Angular Developer Pablo Albella teaches us how to create the best architecture for both these worlds.

Not everybody likes JavaScript frameworks, nor are they always applicable. But even when we don’t want to or can’t use them, there are some parts that are handy to have.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Juan Carlos Arias Ambriz proposes a simple way to recapture some of the benefits of using JSX while working in vanilla JS.

JSON web tokens (JWTs) provide a method of authenticating requests that’s convenient, compact, and secure. More often than not, Angular apps will include them in their data flows.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Sebastian Schocke shows how to implement JWT authentication in an Angular 6 single-page application (SPA), complete with a Node.js back-end.

C++ developers strive to build robust multithreaded applications, but multithreading was never an easy thing to do.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Qt Developer Andrei Smirnov talks about several scenarios exploring concurrent programming with the Qt framework.

The modern, cross-platform programming language Haxe is well-known in some circles, yet many developers have never heard of it. Since it first appeared in 2005, it’s been battle-tested by its loyal—if rather quiet—following.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Kevin Bloch explores the Haxe ecosystem and how to transpile some sample code.