Toptal Engineering Blog

Thanks to rapid advances in technology, large amounts of data generated on social networks can be analyzed with relative ease, especially for those who use the R programming language and Gephi.

Animations make websites look more polished and exciting, and help improve user experience. Explore how the combined potential of SVG and CSS can be leveraged to create animations without relying on external libraries.

Smart homes are the future, but what do you do if you have an old air conditioner or heater in your home? Replacing old devices isn’t always feasible, but you can automate them with a Raspberry Pi.

Testing doesn’t have to be tedious. With these automated testing best practices and tips, software engineers can leverage automated tests to boost their productivity and make their work more enjoyable.

Two heads are better than one. This proverb describes the concept behind ensemble methods in machine learning. Let’s examine why ensembles dominate ML competitions and what makes them so powerful.

RTK Query, part of the Redux Toolkit, provides powerful data-fetching and caching capabilities similar to React Query. This article highlights the functionalities of RTK Query and demonstrates its use in real-life scenarios, complete with detailed code examples.

Data inundates us like never before—how can we hope to analyze it? Graphs (networks, not bar graphs) provide an elegant approach. Find out how to start with the Python NetworkX library to describe, visualize, and analyze “graph theory” datasets.

Maintainable Express.js code after scaling means making common code more feature-rich while reducing boilerplate. Find out how to enable promise-based route code and centralize both error handling and normal-results handling in Express.js apps.

A comprehensive tutorial on how to log SSH activity—minus sensitive input, like passwords—occurring in Linux AWS EC2 instances to either CloudWatch Logs or S3 buckets.

While good engineering managers can code, great ones can also communicate. Written communication is integral to the management and scaling of engineering teams, says Juan Pablo Buritica, who has led several successful teams of engineers.

How source code becomes a running program is often opaque: “Just run the compiler” is all that developers normally need to know.

Writing an interpreter from scratch—including its lexer and parser—is an illuminating challenge.

Visual regression testing is not a new concept. Toptal engineers routinely use it, but with looming deadlines, they sometimes need to innovate and improvise.

This article demonstrates how Toptal QA specialists leveraged UI testing and Cypress to run visual regression tests without resorting to specialized tools.

Researchers snuck vulnerabilities past the peer-review process and into the open-source Linux kernel codebase. What does this mean for the ubiquitous Linux kernel, and open source in general?

Our Express.js REST API series ends with a bang! Learn how to add a Dockerized MongoDB instance, Mongoose, JWT authentication, user permissions, and automated testing with Mocha, Chai, and SuperTest.

Indexes and partitioning can help with SQL performance, but they’re not cure-alls. Through everyday examples of date range and LIKE queries, find out how to “think like an RDBMS” to make yours run faster.

NgRx is a popular Angular state management library, but to unlock its full potential developers may require a few new skills.

In this article, Toptal Full-stack Developer Luka Onikadze explains why he became an NgRx admirer after starting off as a skeptic.