Toptal Engineering Blog

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.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Magento Developer Daniel Cuevas Zamora gives a broad overview of one of the most popular eCommerce platforms and how to get started with it.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer John R. Kosinski will demonstrate a simple Amazon Alexa hack using quintessential Arduino skills and basic hardware.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Tiberius Florea outlines the difference between deep and broad skillsets and explains why broadening your skillset may further your career.

In WordPress, taxonomies allow you to flexibly organize your content in categories with tags and more. However, when defining custom taxonomies, you may not get the desired behavior out of the box.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Rodrigo Donini shows how exclusive custom taxonomies can be implemented in WordPress for strict categorization of posts.

Have you been googling articles on how to build an outstanding developer resume? Stop right now. It’s a waste of time! Cover letter? That’s a waste as well.

What is a computer? What are the limitations of a computer? Are there problems that a computer cannot solve?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Mehmet Bajin explores the fundamentals of computation and the impact they have on computability and complexity.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Tigran Vardanyan covers code styling, essential HTML and CSS practices, and why clean code still matters.

Flaws in your database design are like cracks in your application’s foundations. If left unchecked, trying to fix them down the line will be costly to say the least.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Fernando Martinez discusses some of the most common database design bad practices and how to avoid them.

When it comes to theming; that is, changing the look and feel of your website while maintaining the same layout, Sass’ features—like mixins or functions—can feel like taking a plane instead of walking! In this tutorial on SCSS, we’re going to create a minimal theme and use SCSS to give our CSS programming some superpowers.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Silvestar Bistrovic explains the process of migrating a WordPress blog to a static site generator using Hexo, outlining the pros and cons of the approach.

In this article, I will talk about how object and variable references are controlled in memory, since this is an issue that can generate discussion and differing opinions. One question to ponder is: “By default, are objects passed by reference or by copy in PHP?” I’m going to talk first about what references aren’t in PHP; secondly, I’ll discuss what they are, and finally, I will examine how the garbage collector works in PHP.

Elasticsearch is one of the most powerful full-text search engine solutions out there. Using the NEST package, you can easily leverage the power of Elasticsearch in your .NET projects.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Ivan Cesar shows how Elasticsearch can solve real-world full-text search problems in your .NET projects.