Toptal Engineering Blog

Deploying instances of a web application to one or more servers manually can often be a monotonous process, and take up a significant amount of your time. With little effort, it is possible to automate the process of deploying your web application with almost zero human intervention. This article outlines a simple approach to automating web application deployments using GitHub webhooks, buildpacks, and Procfiles.

In Part I of this three-part series, we saw how the free motion of rigid bodies can be simulated. In Part II, we saw how to make bodies aware of each other through collision and proximity tests. Up to this point, however, we still have not seen how to make objects truly interact with each other. The final step to simulating realistic, solid objects, is to apply constraints, defining restrictions on the motion of rigid bodies.

In this article, we’ll discuss equality constraints and inequality constraints. We’ll describe them first in terms of a force-based approach, where corrective forces are computed, and then in terms of an impulse-based approach, where corrective velocities are computed instead. Finally, we’ll go over some clever tricks to eliminate unnecessary work and speed up computation.

Analysts have come to recognize social network data as a virtual treasure trove of information for sensing public opinion trends and groundswells of support. In this article, Toptal Engineer Elder Santos describes the techniques he employed for a proof-of-concept that effectively analyzed Twitter Trend Topics to predict, as a sample test case, regional voting patterns in the 2014 Brazilian presidential election.

Backbone.js equips the developer with an array of tools that are minimal but extremely flexible. This gives developers the option to design the applications the way they want, but also introduces a number of way things can go wrong. This article outlines a few common mistakes that Backbone.js developers can make, and how they may avoid them.

Log files may very well be one of the most underestimated and underutilized tools at a developer’s disposal. Beyond their value for debugging, with a bit of creativity and forethought, logs files can be leveraged to serve as a valuable source of usage information and analytics. In this article, In this article, Toptal engineer Ilya Sanosyan provides a practical guide to maximizing the value we get from our logs.

AngularJS is a very powerful framework. It is the third most starred repository on GitHub. It is not difficult to start using, but the goals that it is intended to accomplish demand comprehension. No longer can we ignore memory consumption, because it will not reset on navigation anymore. This is the vanguard of web development. Let’s embrace it!

Machine learning has changed the way we deal with data. Data driven problems, that are difficult to solve using standard methods, can often be tackled with much more ease using machine learning algorithms. In this article, we will explore Azure Machine Learning features and capabilities through solving one of the problems that we face in our everyday lives.

We will see technology push its way forward and society will be the better for it. The exciting question is who will lead this wave of disruption?

C++ is a general purpose programming language that offers great flexibility when it comes to system programming and application development. The language, however, comes with some pitfalls requiring attention from developers to ensure quality programming. This article explains how ten of the most common C++ developer mistakes can be avoided.

In today’s data-driven world, researchers are busy answering interesting questions by churning through huge volumes of data. Some obvious challenges they face are due to the sheer size of the dataset they have to deal with. In this article, we take a peek at a simple business intelligence platform implemented on top of the MongoDB Aggregation Pipeline.

While the Apple Watch is on track to be a commercial success for Apple and its shareholders, technologists are still not entirely convinced smartwatches have what it takes to conquer the market, at least not yet.

What does this mean for developers? What are the implications for other smartwatch platforms and companies behind them?

Apache Lucene is a powerful Java library used for implementing full-text search on a corpus of text. With its wide array of configuration options and customizability, it is possible to tune Apache Lucene specifically to the corpus at hand - improving both search quality and query capability.

This article gives us a glimpse of the simplicity and ease of customization of the Apache Lucene analysis pipeline.

iOS 8 introduced a new concept called App Extensions. This new feature did not break down the walls between the applications, but it opened a few doors providing gentle yet tangible contact between some apps. The latest update gave us an option to customize the iOS ecosystem, and we are eager to see this path opening up as well.

Developers often automate certain repetitive and tedious tasks to save time as well as to stay focused on the task at hand.

This article demonstrates how simple and easy it is to use Gulp as a build tool.

Texts are an integral part of user interfaces. In many cases, text annotation plays a vital role in grabbing the user’s attention or allowing the user to decorate and highlight the content they produce.

In this article, we walk through the ins and outs of an open-source JavaScript library built for annotating texts on the web.

You are what you read – and most Toptal members and blog subscribers are software developers. So what do you read? Where do professional developers get the latest information about how their peers work and think?

Today, we will be taking a look at a small selection of popular developer blogs frequented by Toptal developers. We’re counting on you (our readers) to expand the list in the comment section.