Toptal Engineering Blog

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.

Out of the box, Angular provides two different change detection strategies: Default and OnPush. Each strategy has its own advantages, but sometimes it is easy to miss a nifty optimization opportunity if you stick to the default strategy.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Ahmet Shapiro-Erciyas walks us through the available change detection strategies and shows how to use them in any Angular project.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Konrad Gadzinowski dissects trunk-based development and Git flow, listing the pros and cons for various use cases.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Roman Stetsenko explains what it takes to create a pixel-perfect iOS interface from the ground up and why it matters.

Do you think testing your iOS or Android apps manually is faster than writing automated tests for them? Calabash, the cross-platform acceptance framework, busts that myth once and for all.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Alexander Gedevanishvili shows how Calabash, with its support for Cucumber, makes writing automated UI tests as simple as writing instructions in plain English.

Complex, tightly-coupled, and fragile interdependent code. We’ve all written it. The kind of code where fixing one bug creates seven more. Have you ever wondered how to create independent modular code?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Konrad Gadzinowski walks us through the different types of architectural paradigms you can adhere to and how to write modular and decoupled code where changes to one module have minimal impact on the overall application.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Adam Wasserman explains what software entropy is, what causes it and how it manifests itself, and what can be done to prevent it or mitigate its effects.

Validating user inputs is an essential part of any robust web application. Angular 4 makes it especially easy for both template-driven and reactive forms.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Angular Developer Igor Geshoski walks us through the different approaches in Angular 4 form validation and shows how even complex form validation can be done easily.

Is there really an ultimate best JavaScript front-end framework? Maybe there isn’t, but there is a way to choose the best framework for your web project.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Giorgi Bakradze takes a look at four of the most popular frameworks from five important perspectives that make it easy to determine which one is the best fit for your project’s needs.