Toptal Engineering Blog

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.

Data warehouses aren’t exactly a new concept, but industry demand for data science services, coupled with the rise of AI and machine learning, is making them more relevant than ever. In this post, Toptal Data Warehouse Developer Chamitha Wanaguru outlines three basic principles you need to keep in mind when developing a new data warehouse.

The de facto standard for web application security is the Open Web Application Security Project’s Top 10 Project. It lists the ten most prevalent security threats based on an extensive amount of data and community feedback and was updated in late 2017. In this article, Toptal Freelance Full-stack and System Security Developer Hrvoje Gazibara discusses the changes to the OWASP Top 10’s most recent revision by illustrating new vulnerabilities, and even some that were removed.

In recent years, React has established itself as the most popular library in the JavaScript universe. However, rather than rest on its laurels, the React team is still working hard to make it better. In the second part of our React tutorial series, Toptal JavaScript Developer Kamil Jakubczak takes a closer look at some of its features, including hooks, the latest addition to React.

A monorepository is a code management and architectural concept whereby you keep all your isolated bits of code in one super repository instead of managing multiple smaller repositories—like a single repository for your website and mobile apps. In this article, Toptal Freelance Front-end Developer Alexander Noel attempts to gather and explain as much information as possible about how and when to use monorepos.

It’s easy to start working with a spreadsheet, but it also takes time to master your skills to use all the powerful features it provides. When you start feeling comfortable with formulas, functions, pivot tables, etc., there is still one more level which allows you to achieve even more—custom extensions. In this article, I’m going to focus on extending Google Spreadsheets with a Google Apps Script that validates European Union VAT IDs via API calls.

REST APIs are used in every language and on every platform. Building a secure REST API is a must-have tool in every developer's arsenal. In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Sergio Moretti shows how to secure a REST API using Spring Boot.