Toptal Engineering Blog

Building and scaling engineering teams is more complicated than just hiring additional people. As teams grow, everything has to change.

In the latest on-demand Toptal Webinar, our Vice President of R&D Bozhidar Batsov and Chief People Officer Michelle Labbe discuss how to build and scale best-in-class engineering teams.

Testing can be a daunting task even for experienced teams with an abundance of resources. How do Toptal developers write tests and what do they use?

In this article, Toptal React Developer Boris Yordanov introduces you to Picasso, a component library designed by our developers for in-house use.

When you hear the word “linter,” you probably think about particular widely used tools. But there’s a different kind of linters.

In this article, Toptal Back-end Architect Robert Pankowecki introduces you to linters implemented by Ruby libraries and details their capabilities.

What makes a successful engineering manager? Success usually depends on how managers lead their people, product, and technology.

In this article, we examine what it takes to get started and progress in the engineering manager role.

The concise syntax of Scala usually helps developers avoid writing boilerplate. When repetitive code is required anyway, developers can use macros and quasiquotes to keep code clean and maintainable. Here’s how.

As microservices architecture continues to evolve, interservice communication has become a significant challenge to manage. Service meshes are becoming the standard solution, but how do popular and up-and-coming service meshes compare?

Toptal was an early adopter of an all-remote business model. As one of the leading remote workforces worldwide, Toptal strives to engage with other thought leaders and innovators in this space.

In our latest on-demand webinar, Former Engineering Manager Marco Santos spoke with James Bourne, Editor-in-Chief of TechForge Media, about best practices for remote engineering teams.

Reporting and visualizing data is crucial to businesses of all sizes. Dashboards allow users to efficiently access and use this data for a range of business operations.

In this article, Toptal Full-stack Engineer Dylan Golow demonstrates how he created a powerful dashboard for telemedicine using Airtable, Typeform, and React.

The Express.js REST API journey continues! Move from models to full DAOs and DTOs, validate requests with middleware, separate services from controllers, and prepare for a real database.

Harnessing the potential of machine learning for computer vision is not a new concept but recent advances and the availability of new tools and datasets have made it more accessible to developers.

In this article, Toptal Software Developer Teimur Gasanov demonstrates how you can create an app capable of identifying handwritten digits in under 30 minutes, including the API and UI.

Extracting functional components from a monolithic app into a service can be a daunting task but choosing the right tools and techniques for the job can expedite the process.

In this article, Toptal Back-end Engineer Maciek Rzasa recounts how his team extracted billing functionality from the Toptal platform and how they overcame a series of performance issues.

Software development is a complex process, and evaluating the performance of software engineers can be too. Finding the right balance between complexity and practicality in software engineer performance reviews is vital.

In this article, Toptal Engineering Blog Editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic outlines the difference between commonly used performance review models and discusses how they should be employed.

WebAssembly gives near-native performance to web apps and allows languages other than JavaScript—plus their libraries—to be used on the web. This tutorial leverages Rust and the Web Audio API to make a basic guitar tuner app that runs at 60 FPS, even on mobile.

The Apple M1 processor represents a significant step forward for Apple, but what does it mean for developers, designers, and other professionals using Apple hardware?

In this article, Toptal Engineering Blog Editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic outlines what makes the M1 different and what professionals need to keep in mind should they choose to upgrade their hardware.

Time and date manipulation is notoriously difficult. Developers encountering time zone rules, leap seconds, differences in locale-specific formatting are wise to resort to popular time and date manipulation libraries. But without thinking about how exactly they work, it’s still easy to create all sorts of obscure bugs.

Git provides basic branching operations, but advanced patterns are left up to the user. The popular “Git flow” branching model helps, but can also complicate some common procedures.

Thankfully, a new variation retains the benefits, while streamlining everyday work.