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.

Toptalauthors 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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Toptalauthors 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.

Clean Code and the Art of Exception Handling

Exceptions are a fundamental element of modern programming—and nothing to fear. Implement these exception handling best practices to write clean code that is easier to maintain.

12 minute readContinue Reading
Ahmed AbdelHalim

Ahmed AbdelHalim

Ahmed is a back-end (API) developer who loves building useful and fun tools. He also has experience as a web developer.

HSA For Developers: Heterogeneous Computing For The Masses

HSA is a set of standards and specifications designed to allow further integration of CPUs and GPUs on the same bus. This is not an entirely new concept, but HSA takes it to the next level. HSA would effectively take the developer out of the equation, at least when it comes to assigning different loads to different processing cores.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor and resident chip geek Nermin Hajdarbegovic takes a closer look at HSA and the future of heterogeneous computing in general. Get ready for some good news, but don’t forget to brace for bad news first.

18 minute readContinue Reading
Nermin Hajdarbegovic

Nermin Hajdarbegovic

As a veteran tech writer, Nermin helped create online publications covering everything from the semiconductor industry to cryptocurrency.

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Getting Started with the Elixir Programming Language

Elixir, a dynamic, functional programming language, is designed for building scalable and maintainable applications with a simple, modern, and tidy syntax. Although it is easy to understand, Elixir’s approach to concurrency and its data type nuances require some getting used to.

In this article, Toptal engineer Kleber Virgilio Correia gives us a comprehensive guide to the various basic data types in that are available in Elixir.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Kleber Virgilio Correia

Kleber Virgilio Correia

Kleber’s long professional experience has covered Unix, Agile, functional and OOP languages, REST APIs, distributed apps, and the cloud.

Handling Intensive Tasks with Laravel

When dealing with time consuming, resource intensive tasks, most PHP developers are tempted to choose the “quick hack route”. We’ve all used “ini_set(‘max_execution_time’, HUGE_INT);” before, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

In today’s tutorial, PHP developer Daniel Gheorghe demonstrates how an application’s user experience may be improved by separating long-running tasks from the main request flow using Laravel.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Daniel Gheorghe

Daniel Gheorghe

Daniel is a Zend Certified PHP Engineer with 10+ years of experience as the lead PHP developer for multiple companies around the world.

Toptal's Quick and Practical CSS Cheat Sheet

As software engineers, we’re always searching for the best tools and guides that will help us to be more productive while spending less time searching and reading long technical specifications.

Today, Toptal is pleased to present an entirely new resource to the community as a free download: a CSS Cheat Sheet. Toptal’s CSS Cheat Sheet is a quick CSS reference guide, and includes CSS syntax, the most important selectors, properties, sizes, and units, and other useful CSS details, all in a short, easily understandable format.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Tomislav Bacinger

Tomislav Bacinger

Tomislav (MSc) has spent more than 15 years in full-stack development and data analysis, but geospatial visualizations are his favorite.

Rethinking Authentication And Biometric Security, The Toptal Way

How does one secure a vast, distributed network of tech talent? There are three ways of doing this: the right way, the wrong way, and the Toptal way. Today, we will be discussing the latter, and unveiling our plans for a comprehensive overhaul of our onboarding and authentication procedures.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic will help you get acquainted with our brand new processes. Since all Toptalers will be required to use our new security platform, we encourage you to comment and contribute to our efforts.

12 minute readContinue Reading
Nermin Hajdarbegovic

Nermin Hajdarbegovic

As a veteran tech writer, Nermin helped create online publications covering everything from the semiconductor industry to cryptocurrency.

Mastering 2D Cameras in Unity: A Tutorial for Game Developers

Camera systems are very important in conveying the right atmosphere in video games. When developing games, even 2D ones, advanced cameras should be your tool of choice.

In this article, Toptal engineer Mihai Cozma shows us how to build a modular camera system for 2D platform games using some simple components in Unity that can be easily extended to 2.5D or even 3D games.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Mihai Cozma

Mihai Cozma

Mihai has 11+ years of professional experience with various technologies and tools. He is proficient at C/ C++, .NET, and Unity 3D.

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.
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Previously At

Shopify

Most-read Articles

Marcos Henrique da Silva

Creating a Secure REST API in Node.js

By Marcos Henrique da Silva
13 minute readContinue Reading

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