Toptal Engineering Blog

The Bitcoin Lightning Network is an independent solution that’s heralded as the solution to bitcoin’s scaling problem by keeping fees minuscule and making transactions instant, away from the blockchain. In this article, Toptal Freelance Blockchain Developer Amin Shah Gilani explores what the Bitcoin Lightning Network really is, how it can make the guarantees it provides, and its current state.

WordPress maintenance tends to be straightforward and some may even consider it mundane. However, this doesn’t mean you should take it lightly, as it can still consume a lot of time. In this article, Toptal WordPress Developer Hassan Jamal outlines ten essential WordPress maintenance tips that could help you save hours of work and keep your websites up to date with relative ease.

When complex systems are life-critical, it can be extremely difficult to modernize and upgrade them safely. While many engineers will never work on such systems, there is much to be learned from those who do. In this article, Toptal Solutions Architect Dr. Kyle Kotowick explains how to properly maintain and update systems that are too important to fail.

We’ll explore the application of parameterization and how it relates to mainstream design patterns such as dependency injection, strategy, template method, and others. In Python, many of these are made unnecessary by the fact that parameters can be callable objects or classes.

Continuous deployment is the practice of automatically deploying new code to production. Most continuous deployment systems validate that the code to be deployed with tests, and then build and deploy if everything looks good. However, there’s a better way. In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Antoine Reversat builds an event-driven continuous deployment pipeline that builds first and then runs tests on our final deployment artifact before deploying. This makes test results more reliable, and the CD pipeline easily extendable.

One of the best ways to elevate your status as a WordPress developer, at least in the eyes of your clients, is to become skilled at writing API consumers. In this article, Toptal Freelance WordPress Developer Scott Fennell guides you through five techniques that will help you create powerful WordPress API clients to perfectly suit your needs.

Join an expert in a look back in horror at his most embarrassing mistakes in his early days as a WordPress developer. He discusses general PHP bugs, WordPress-specific bugs, and also mistakes made at a managerial level while supervising other developers.

When your app’s next iteration is ready to deploy, you have two choices: either stop the entire application and deploy the new version manually every time or build an automated zero downtime CI/CD deployment pipeline once. In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Gaurav Kohli demonstrates the latter using the Jenkins-powered continuous deployment pipeline of a three-tier web application built in Node.js, deployed on AWS Cloud, and using Terraform as an infrastructure orchestrator.