Toptal Engineering Blog

The advantages of SVG on the web go beyond producing resolution-independent graphics. With a little CSS and JavaScript, you can apply cool animations and effects to your front-end without requiring the user to install bulky plugins.

Sharing related information among isolated systems has become increasingly important. There are many methods to choose from to perform that task for SQL Server, but it’s important to know which is better for each use case.

WordPress is a very popular way to get a site up and running quickly. However, in their haste, plenty of developers end up making horrible decisions. Some mistakes, like leaving WP_DEBUG set to “true,” may be easy to make. Others, like lumping all your JavaScript into a single file, are as common as lazy engineers. Whichever mistake you manage to make, read on to find out the 12 most common WordPress mistakes that new and seasoned developers make.

Write better Ruby code by leveraging its metaprogramming features. In this article, you will learn how to create your own Ruby domain specific language (DSL).

Process-oriented programming is a paradigm in which the process structure and communication between processes of a system are the primary concerns. That’s the paradigm, but how does it work in real life?

Premature optimization hurts experts and novices alike. How can you know when and how to optimize without shooting your project in the foot?

This week, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Kevin Bloch walks project managers through some time-tested optimization strategies and when to use them.

Optimization sounds ideal. Ironically, the very aspect of our code we are trying to optimize can be sabotaged by this process, taking out innocent bystanders along the way. Is it a perfectionists’ goldmine…or minefield? In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Kevin Bloch offers a more balanced approach to the art and science of optimization.

Building a reactive web application is a lot more about how you handle events and data flow in your applications than the tools you use to do so. However, Angular 2 with Ngrx seems to be the perfect combination for building reactive applications for many reasons.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Simon Boissonneault-Robert walks you through a reactive web application tutorial using Angular and Ngrx and shows how these two technologies make it easy to do that.

Laravel is a PHP framework developed with developer productivity in mind. Written and maintained by Taylor Otwell, the framework is very opinionated and strives to save developer time by favoring convention over configuration. The framework also aims to evolve with the web and has already incorporated several new features and ideas in the web development world—such as job queues, API authentication out of the box, real-time communication, and much more.

In this article, we’ll explore the ways you can build—and test—a robust API using Laravel. We’ll be using Laravel 5.4, and all of the code is available for reference on GitHub.

Is Angular vs. React just a matter of personal preference? This article gives an in-depth comparison and analysis of various Angular and React components in light of real-world applications.

Dropwizard allows developers to quickly bootstrap their projects and package applications as easily deployable standalone services. It also happens to be relatively simple to use and implement.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Dusan Simonovic will introduce you to Dropwizard and demonstrate how you can use this powerful framework to create RESTful web services with ease.

Docker itself has been around for years and is composed of many inter-operating pieces. One of them is Docker Swarm, which allows you to declare your applications as stacks of services, and let Docker handle the rest.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Luke Sapan explains how to use Docker Swarm to deploy your own self-managing stack, followed by a quick example.

Build a bot that analyzes the sentiment of incoming email messages using Recursive Neural Tensor Networks from the Stanford NLP library.

Spring Batch is a lightweight, comprehensive framework designed to facilitate the development of robust batch applications. It’s easy to set up, and even easier to use.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Alexey Saenko explains the programming model and the domain language of batch applications, using detailed code examples that should help any developer looking to get a head start in Spring Batch.

Knowledge of CSS is a fundamental skill in the web development space. However, implementing certain web design patterns with just CSS can be a frustrating task, and often requires an in-depth understanding of it.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Web Developer Rico Mossesgeld shares several CSS tips and tricks that take advantage of lesser known CSS features to solve real layout and design problems.

Video accounts for more than three quarters of all bandwidth used today. That’s why developers need a solid, extensible, and advanced media framework that doesn’t come with a steep learning curve.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Raul Jimenez will introduce you to one such framework – Videogular. If you need to harness the power of Angular for HTML5 video, look no further.

Twitter is a goldmine of data. Unlike other social platforms, almost every user’s tweets are completely public and pullable.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Anthony Sistilli will be exploring how you can use Python, the Twitter API, and data mining techniques to gather useful data.

Recently, I was challenged to create my own grid system and, since re-inventing the wheel is always useful as a learning experience, I went for it. I knew it would be an interesting challenge, but I was surprised by how easy it turned out to be!

There is no way around application diagnostics. No matter how good your code is, you will need to be able to monitor and study system behavior. This is where Android’s DDMS shines.

In this article, Senior Android Engineer Gilad Haimov explains how veteran Android developers leverage the potential of DDMS to improve app stability and performance, test new features, diagnose, and debug their code.

Why does a React web app run slow? The answer often lies in when and how frequently your components re-render, and whether those re-renders were even necessary. React doesn’t promise magical performance gains, but it provides just the right tools and functionalities to make it easy.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer William Wang walks us through some optimization techniques that can help you build performant React web apps.

Social networks are among the biggest sources of data today, and this means they are an extremely valuable asset for marketers, big data specialists, and even individual users like journalists and other professionals. Harnessing the potential of real-time Twitter data is also useful in many time-sensitive business processes.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Hanee’ Medhat explains how you can build a simple Python application to leverage the power of Apache Spark, and then use it to read and process tweets to identify trending hashtags.