Toptal Engineering Blog

Since almost all smartphones today are equipped with location sensors, motion sensors, bluetooth, and wifi, today’s mobile apps can use context awareness to dramatically increase their capabilities and value. This article walks you through building a context aware app that employs complex event processing.

Reverse engineering and hacking are usually related to malicious activities that result in sleepless nights of engineers responsible for system maintenance.

Reverse engineering is a tool that we can utilize to find the flaws and improve our software in many aspects. This article shows us how to use these techniques to learn more about different implementations of web API.

One of the biggest and most common problems in front-end web development is state management. A developer is constantly focused on keeping the state object in sync with its view and the DOM representation. Users can interact with the application in many ways and it’s a big task to provide a clean transition from one view state to another.

We will see how using React JavaScript library can help us reduce application complexity and offload UI transitions from our application.

The publish-subscribe pattern (or pub/sub, for short) is a messaging pattern where senders of messages (publishers), do not program the messages to be sent directly to specific receivers (subscribers). Instead, the programmer “publishes” messages (events), without any knowledge of any subscribers there may be.

This article provides insight in how to use the pub/sub pattern, in Rails, to communicate messages between different system components without these components knowing anything about each other’s identity.

This article provides step by step guide for building hybrid multiplatform real-time mobile application using the Ionic Framework and the Firebase.

Data Driven Documents, or D3.js, is an awesome data visualization library. In this article, I’ll discuss one particularly compelling application of D3.js: map making. We’ll go through the common challenges of building a useful and informative web map, and show how in each case, D3.js gives you everything you need to make your map look and feel beautiful.

As mobile and tablet devices come closer to achieving final world domination, web technology is in a race to accommodate the ever-growing number screen sizes. However, devising tools to meet the challenges of this phenomenon brings a whole new set of problems, with one of the latest buzzwords to emerge being “responsive web”.

This article provides an overview on building a great Android application, from defining an idea to releasing an application to the store. Toptal developer Ivan Dimoski gives us a chance to learn from his experience in making Ooshies, an Android Live Wallpaper designed to give you a hug and make you feel loved each time you interact with your Android device.

Apple has released a fully functional WatchKit and SDK that enables iOS developers with all the tools to start building their Apple Watch applications.

This article provides quick overview of the Apple Watch functionalities from a developers perspective.

Linux namespaces make it possible to run a whole range of applications on a single real machine and ensure no two of them can interfere with each other, without having to resort to using virtual machines. In a single-user computer, a single system environment may be fine. But on a server, where you may want to run multiple services, it is essential to security and stability that the services are as isolated from each other as possible.

CakePHP is an amazing PHP framework, but it has a steep learning curve! It requires a good amount of research and training to become an expert.

This article describes few bad practices when writing a CakePHP code, and proposes the correct approach to avoid them.

ESA’s Rosetta mission soft-landed its Philae probe on a comet, the first time in history that such an extraordinary feat has been achieved. Closely after that, Microsoft Open Sourced .NET.

The first event is a great step for mankind, and the latter is even greater for Microsoft!

As is known worldwide, the Chinese government enforces strict censorship on the internet. Virtually everything is under the government’s surveillance. In order to be allowed to operate, ISPs and internet content providers in China usually have their own content filtering mechanism for blocking or removing the published content by its users, or even deleting users’ account directly if they are assumed to be illegal under the government policy.

There are thousands of different Android powered devices, with different screen sizes, chip architectures, hardware configurations, and software versions. Unfortunately, segmentation is the price to pay for openness, and there are thousands ways your app can fail on different devices.

Regardless of such huge segmentation, the majority of bugs are actually introduced because of logic errors. These bugs are easily prevented, as long as we get the basics right!

Here’s a quick rundown of the 10 most common mistakes Android developers make.

Git can support your project not just with version control, but also with collaboration and release management. Understanding how workflow patterns can help or hinder a project will give you the knowledge to evaluate and adapt your project’s Git processes effectively.

Wouldn’t it be great to develop for Google Glass without learning a new programming language, and even by just using knowledge common to all web developers? Yes, it is possible!

This article will introduce you to web development techniques you can use to build application used on Google Glass.