Toptal Engineering Blog

Between square inch smart wristwatches and mammoth smart TVs, a responsive website capable of adapting to a wide array of screen sizes and device capabilities is something no one complains about. However, many websites are still plagued by desktop-first design paradigms, or mobile-first paradigms with absolutely no focus on performance. These traditional approaches to responsive web design have various shortcomings. Fortunately, some simple ideas can help solve these problems.

Cars with next-generation connected infotainment systems will create new opportunities on several fronts. In case you already have an infotainment system with a neat touchscreen and GPS in your car, please accept my condolences; it’s about to become as obsolete as a Nokia 3310 compared to an iPhone.

The newest version of the Java platform, Java 8, was released more than a year ago. Many companies and developers are still starting new applications with old versions of Java. There are very few good reasons to do this, because Java 8 has brought some important improvements to the language. I’ll show you a handful of the most useful and interesting ones.

Bitcoin created a lot of buzz on the Internet. It was ridiculed, it was attacked, and eventually it was accepted and became a part of our lives. However, Bitcoin is not alone. At this moment, there are over 700 AltCoin implementations, which use similar principles of CryptoCurrency.

Docker, an open source tool, has changed the way we think about deploying applications to servers. By leveraging some amazing resource isolation features of the Linux kernel, Docker makes it possible to easily isolate server applications into containers, control resource allocation, and design simpler deployment pipelines. Moreover, Docker enables all of this without the additional overhead of full-fledged virtual machines.

The Spring Framework is a powerful, feature-rich, and well-designed framework for the Java platform. It offers a collection of programming and configuration models that aim to simplify and streamline the development process of robust and testable applications in Java. In this article, Toptal engineer Stefan Varga challenges the popular notion of Java as a complicated platform for simple needs, and walks us through a step by step tutorial to building a simple MVC application with the Spring Framework and JPA.

In this article I’ll relate my experience with the popular Unity game development platform and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern for game development. In my seven years of development, having wrestled with my fair share of game dev spaghetti, I’ve been achieving great code structure and development speed using this design pattern.

Some people like the known and predictable. They freak out when their daily routine gets disrupted. But, I’ll bet if you are doing any kind of creative work like programming or design, you are not one of those people. Ordinary day-to-day office work will kill you. It will eventually strip your motivation, creativity or flare for what you do.

A large number of modern mobile applications interact with web services in one way or another, and iOS applications are no different. Mantle (a model framework) and Realm (a mobile database) come with the promise of simplifying some of the hurdles in consuming web services through RESTful APIs and persisting data locally. In this article, Toptal engineer Marcin Kmiec shows how to build a simple iOS application using Mantle and Realm and demonstrates how this approach helps to eliminate a large amount of boilerplate code.

Even if you have a brand new notebook and a flagship smartphone, you should not rely on stock hardware for professional voice calls. It’s simply not good enough; otherwise there would be no aftermarket audio industry to begin with.

OpenGL, a cross-platform API for rendering 2D and 3D graphics, is extremely powerful and yet surprisingly easy to get started with. Although one may find the most common applications of OpenGL and rendered graphics in video games only, in reality there are far more uses. To demonstrate the power of OpenGL, we’ll be building a Mandelbrot set generator on Android using OpenGL ES.

Despite the prevalence of higher-level languages, the C programming language continues to empower the world. There are plenty of reasons to believe that C programming will remain active for a long time. Here are some reasons that C is unbeatable, and almost mandatory, for certain applications.

Google’s new cloud code platform does not appear to be taking on GitHub head on. Instead, Cloud Source Repositories (CSR) will allow users to connect to repositories hosted on GitHub or Bitbucket. However, everything is automatically synced to the Google Cloud Source Repository.

The good news is that a Google CSR can be connected to another Git repository hosted on GitHub or Bitbucket. All changes will be synchronised on both platforms, as you can set Google CSR to automatically mirror from GitHub and Bitbucket.

It is not uncommon for developers to find themselves in need of a UI component that is either not provided by the platform they are targeting or is, indeed, provided, but lacks a certain property or behavior. The answer to both scenarios is a custom UI component. The Android UI model is inherently customizable, offering the means to create custom UI components in various ways.

Mastering CSS is an absolute necessity for any solid web designer or developer. This tutorial walks you through the fundamentals of CSS layout principles, from classic CSS2 techniques to the latest approaches in CSS3. Learn more about how to leverage all that CSS has to offer in order to optimize both the user’s experience and the quality of your code.

In today’s world where there are a lot of choices for writing quality software, it’s easy to overlook some tools that are viable options in developing modern software. These software development tools, in competition with each other, often fluctuate in popularity and developer preferences. Many excellent tools are viable options for any given project. This article provides eight reason in favor of the Microsoft stack and why it is still a reasonable choice for software development today.