Toptal Engineering Blog

Would you like to test your PHP code like a boss? Do you feel that basic unit tests and PHPUnit just don’t cut it anymore? If your answer to both questions is yes, you might want to try Codeception, a mature and well-documented testing framework designed to outperform PHPUnit and Behat.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vasily Koval describes how he came to take the plunge and start using Codeception, and he explains why you should check out Codeception for your PHP testing needs.

Before you use Unity’s straightforward and intuitive tool for multi-platform development, become familiar with and avoid these common Unity mistakes.

Do you have what it takes to travel the globe while working full-time? Can you work on the road while still finding enough time to take care of yourself and enjoy the adventures of travel? It’s not a lifestyle for everyone, but it’s probably not as tricky or demanding as you think, especially when you have a sense of purpose.

In this article, Toptal Director of Operations Dror Liebenthal explains how to enjoy the nomadic lifestyle without compromising your professional performance, health, or social life.

Clustering algorithms are very important to unsupervised learning and are key elements of machine learning in general. These algorithms give meaning to data that are not labelled and help find structure in chaos. But not all clustering algorithms are created equal; each has its own pros and cons.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Lovro Iliassich explores a heap of clustering algorithms, from the well known K-Means algorithm to the elegant, state-of-the-art Affinity Propagation technique.

Software engineers are always searching for the best tools and guides to help them be more productive and allow them to spend less time reading long technical specifications.

Today, Toptal is pleased to present a new resource to the community: the JavaScript Cheat Sheet - ES6 and Beyond. Toptal’s JavaScript Cheat Sheet is a quick, easily understandable reference guide. It is free to download and includes all the new and exciting features introduced with ES6 as well as the future experimental features from ES7.

It’s tragically common for developers to come into a project where proper automated testing has been and will continue to be overlooked. It’s a situation Freelance Developer Bhushan Lodha has found himself in all too often; fortunately, he’s found a solution. In this article, he briefly covers the reasons why testing is overlooked and ultimately explains his “coding life hack” to ensure quality control even when he can’t introduce a testing framework.

Some platforms have an overwhelming number of options for web frameworks. Node.js, the event-driven server-side JavaScript environment, is one such platform. Whether it’s the minimalist Express or the full-blown MVC web framework Sails.js, Node.js seems to have it all.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Chuoxian Yang explores four of the most popular Node.js web frameworks and discusses how each framework stands out from the rest of the crowd in Node.js.