Toptal Engineering Blog

The Toptal Engineering Blog is a hub for in-depth development tutorials and new technology announcements created by professional software engineers in the Toptal network.

authors are vetted experts in their fields and write on topics in which they have demonstrated experience. All of our content is peer reviewed and validated by Toptal experts in the same field.

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A Deeper Meaning: Topic Modeling in Python

Colloquial language doesn’t lend itself to computation. That’s where natural language processing steps in. Learn how topic modeling helps computers understand human speech.

8-minute readContinue Reading

Federico Albanese

Federico is a developer and data scientist who has worked at Facebook, where he made machine learning model predictions. He is a Python expert and a university lecturer. His PhD research pertains to graph machine learning.

Unity AI Development: A Finite-state Machine Tutorial

Ever wonder how game developers deliver entertaining interplay with the non-player characters they create? Learn how to develop them yourself in our finite-state machine tutorial.

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Garegin Tadevosyan

Garegin is an accomplished Unity and C# game developer. He created a networking protocol for gamified playground equipment, served as the CTO of an educational gaming startup, and was a game developer on a multinational social-casino team.

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TypeScript vs. JavaScript: Your Go-to Guide

Considering you can include as much plain JavaScript as you like in your TypeScript project, what factors should you consider when choosing TypeScript for your application? Let’s explore.

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Daniele Monesi

Daniele is a full-stack developer and cloud solution architect who has worked with many software environments, such as Java-based back ends, Angular- and React-based front ends, and serverless or hybrid cloud infrastructures.

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.

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Juan Manuel Ortiz de Zarate

Juan is a developer, data scientist, and doctoral researcher at the University of Buenos Aires where he studies social networks, AI, and NLP. Juan has more than a decade of data science experience and has published papers at ML conferences, including SPIRE and ICCS.

How to Approach SVG Animations in CSS

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.

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Filip Defar

Filip is a web developer with expertise in highly interactive front-end applications. He helped build data visualizations for several BI products while working for companies such as AlignAlytics and Captario.

Control Your Climate With This Raspberry Pi Thermostat Tutorial

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.

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Ovidiu-Nicu Andrei

Ovidiu-Nicu is a full-stack developer with extensive experience in PHP, JavaScript, and Linux administration. He has developed a number of WordPress plug-ins, large-scale apps, and performance-optimized MySQL procedures.

8 Automated Testing Best Practices for a Positive Testing Experience

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.

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Lev Yastrebov

Lev is an accomplished C# and .NET developer who leverages test-driven development, static analysis, and in-depth knowledge of technologies to solve tasks with robust, clean code. At leading smart marine technology company Wärtsilä, he created an algorithm for 3D seafloor mapping that resolves conflicting data from thousands of nautical charts.

Ensemble Methods: The Kaggle Machine Learning Champion

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.

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Juan Manuel Ortiz de Zarate

Juan is a lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires. His research focuses on AI, NLP, and social networks. He has more than a decade of data science experience and he’s published papers at ML conferences, including SPIRE and ICCS.

Using RTK Query in React Apps With Redux Toolkit

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.

19-minute readContinue Reading

Gurami Dagundaridze

Gurami is a full-stack developer with experience implementing applications in the finance, healthcare, gaming, and entertainment industries. He has worked with a variety of technologies, including React, Node.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, and GraphQL. As a senior front-end engineer at the Bank of Georgia, he led a team that developed a workflow management system, using technologies like Angular and HTML5 and creating a custom UI kit to extend the Semantic UI framework.

Graph Data Science With Python/NetworkX

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.

11-minute readContinue Reading

Federico Albanese

Using Express.js Routes for Promise-based Error Handling

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.

8-minute readContinue Reading

Vitaly Senko

Vitaly is a full-stack developer who has extensive experience in creating apps with Node.js, React, and .NET, including the maintenance of a healthcare platform with nearly 20 million users.

SSH Logging and Session Management Using AWS SSM

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.

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Vimal Paliwal

A certified AWS expert with a master’s degree in computer security, Vimal specializes in automating the cloud with Terraform, Kubernetes, and Python.

The Importance of Written Communication for Engineering Teams

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.

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Stephanie Emma Pfeffer

Stephanie is a sought-after writer for bestselling publications, including New York Magazine.

How to Approach Writing an Interpreter From Scratch

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.

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Sakib Hadžiavdić

A back-end expert, Sakib is the creator of the static site generator Hepek. Always learning, he writes tutorials in English and Bosnian.

Visual Regression Testing With Cypress: A Pragmatic Approach

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.

7-minute readContinue Reading

Rafael Anachoreta

Rafael is a senior QA engineer with nearly 10 years of experience working with testing, automation, and monitoring to make teams and products better.

University of Minnesota Linux Ban Prompts Questions About Open Source

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?

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Michael J. McDonald

Michael J. McDonald is an award-winning journalist who has worked at Bloomberg News and Thomson Financial.

Toptal Engineering Expert

Gabriel Courtemanche

Gabriel is a highly efficient and reliable professional who possesses a broad skill set for web application development. He's been working on a range of products and clients—from working on scalability problems in production engineering teams at Shopify and Autodesk to launching new applications for startups. Most of his work consists of leading technical teams, by creating an easy development environment, fixing technical debts, providing best practices code examples, and mentoring devs.