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.
Share

Featured in

On-demand Reactivity in Vue 3

The release of Vue 3 brought about substantial performance improvements, but they should not overshadow the introduction of new features and paradigms.

In this article, Toptal Full-stack Developer Luka Mikec introduces you to the new Composition API and explains what Vue 3 means for code expressiveness, organization, and reuse.

17-minute readContinue Reading
Luka Mikec

Luka Mikec

Luka has extensive experience in academia and full-stack software development. He is a cotutelle Ph.D. candidate in mathematics and computer science.

Building a Node.js/TypeScript REST API, Part 1: Express.js

Learn practical TypeScript patterns with interfaces and extended classes. Avoid messy console.log() statements with Winston and the Node.js debug module. Create an Express.js-powered REST API back end from scratch!

12-minute readContinue Reading
Marcos Henrique da Silva

Marcos Henrique da Silva

Marcos has 17+ years in IT and development. His passions include REST architecture, Agile development methodology, and JS.

World-class articles, delivered weekly.

By entering your email, you are agreeing to our privacy policy.

Using the Radical Candor Framework for Effective Engineering Management

One tool that managers can consider adding to their management skill set is a practice called Radical Candor. Radical Candor is the ability to care emotionally about the engineer as an individual and valued contributor, while also expressing honesty concerning their efforts and results achieved by those efforts.

6-minute readContinue Reading
Peter Varhol

Peter Varhol

Peter is a technologist and editor on staff at Toptal, and speaks on software development, testing, and DevOps at technical conferences worldwide.

A Splash of EarlGrey: UI Testing the Toptal Talent App

Created by Google as an in-house testing tool, EarlGrey was open-sourced in 2016, and it quickly gained a sizable following in the iOS developer community.

In this article, Toptal Senior QA Automation Engineer Ciprian Balea explains why the Toptal talent app is tested using EarlGrey and demonstrates why you should consider it, too.

8-minute readContinue Reading
Ciprian Balea

Ciprian Balea

Ciprian is a certified scrum master experienced in setting up and developing CI infrastructures and test automation frameworks in various languages.

Spring Security With JWT for REST API

Spring Security is the de facto framework for securing Spring apps, but it can be tricky to configure.

This Spring Security tutorial highlights an efficient JWT solution.

15-minute readContinue Reading
Ioram Gordadze

Ioram Gordadze

Ioram has a master’s degree in computer science and over a decade of professional Java experience. He specializes in enterprise-grade applications.

Create a Publication Chain With Pandoc and Docker

Pandoc is a software package capable of converting documents into various formats, and since it’s available as a Docker image, it’s easy to run.

In this article, Toptal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Phillip Edwards demonstrates how you can easily create a robust publication chain using Pandoc, Docker, and a pinch of Markdown.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Phillip Edwards

Phillip Edwards

A former university lecturer, Phillip has extensive experience in all aspects of software development, with particular expertise in Java.

Leveraging Declarative Programming to Create Maintainable Web Apps

Adopting declarative-style programming techniques allows teams to create web applications that are easier to extend and maintain.

In this article, Toptal Full-stack Developer Peter Suggate demonstrates how to leverage declarative programming and finite-state machines in JavaScript.

13-minute readContinue Reading
Peter Suggate

Peter Suggate

Peter is a full-stack developer with 15 years of experience building apps for the web and desktop.

VSCode Tips and Tricks for Power Users

Mastering your IDE can go a long way toward improving productivity. However, many are reluctant to dive into customization and optimization.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Boris Yordanov explains how you can become a VSCode power user by leveraging official documentation and using a few practical tools.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Boris Yordanov

Boris Yordanov

Boris is an experienced Toptal developer who works mainly with JavaScript and popular JS frameworks such as Angular, React, and Meteor.

Creating a Secure REST API in Node.js

As patterns go, REST APIs are so useful and ubiquitous that every web developer, regardless of language or platform, should know how to build them.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Marcos Henrique da Silva shows how to create a simple and secure REST API for user management on Node.js.

13-minute readContinue Reading
Marcos Henrique da Silva

Marcos Henrique da Silva

Marcos has more than 15 years of experience in IT and development. His passions include REST architecture, Agile development methodology, and JavaScript.

High-performing Apps With Python: A FastAPI Tutorial

Good programming language frameworks make it easy to produce quality products faster. Great frameworks even make the whole development experience enjoyable. FastAPI is a new Python web framework that’s powerful and enjoyable to use.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Zubair Ahmed

Zubair Ahmed

Zubair has three years of experience as a Python developer using Django, Flask, and FastAPI. He works in avionics and aerospace.

Building a Data Warehouse Data Quality Process

Data quality is a crucial element of any successful data warehouse solution. As the complexity of data warehouses increases, so does the need for data quality processes.

In this article, Toptal Data Quality Developer Alexander Hauskrecht outlines how you can ensure a high degree of data quality and why this process is so important.

17-minute readContinue Reading
Toptal emblem

Toptal Talent Network Experts

Full-stack NLP With React: Ionic vs. Cordova vs. React Native

JavaScript frameworks based on React can help you build a fast, reliable mobile app, but it’s not always easy to determine which framework is best for your project. Choosing the wrong framework can result in an app with slow and redundant code.

JavaScript expert Sean Wang builds the same natural language processing mobile application using Cordova, Ionic, and React Native, then discusses the advantages and limitations of each.

37-minute readContinue Reading
Shanglun Wang

Shanglun Wang

Sean is a passionate polyglot: a full-stack wizard, sysadmin, and data scientist. He’s also developed market intelligence software.

SQL Indexes Explained, Pt. 2

Sorting a table can make some queries faster—but the maintenance cost is untenable. Enter real database indexes and their most common implementation structure: the B-tree.

10-minute readContinue Reading
Mirko Marović

Mirko Marović

Mirko designs and develops massive, extreme-workload databases. He also trains software developers on databases and SQL.

Quality Assurance Testing Perfected: A User Flow Tutorial

As products and services deploy faster and faster, quality assurance (QA) has to adapt and deliver more coverage in less time while maintaining high quality.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Jade Russel Hancox examines how we can use the user flow to boost the speed and efficiency of QA processes without compromising on quality.

11-minute readContinue Reading
Jade Russel Hancox

Jade Russel Hancox

Jade is an award-winning quality assurance professional with extensive experience in manual QA and the automation of APIs, UIs, and databases.

Hybrid Power: Flutter Advantages and Benefits

Google’s Flutter framework has quickly caught on among developers who want to target Android and iOS from the same codebase—and businesses who know the value of a single project team yielding presence in both markets.

15-minute readContinue Reading
Asad Jibran Ahmed

Asad Jibran Ahmed

Jibran is a software engineer with more than a decade of experience building scalable, cross-platform products. He has led engineering teams at early-stage startups and enterprises like Stripe, with a focus on clean architecture and long-term maintainability. He specializes in developing mobile apps with Flutter and React Native to deliver multi-platform user experiences from a single codebase.

React Test-driven Development: From User Stories to Production

Employing a test-driven development (TDD) approach in React projects tends to be straightforward, especially with the aid of Jest and Enzyme. However, there are a few things to look out for.

In this article, a Toptal JavaScript expert demonstrates his React TDD process, from epics and user stories to development and production.

10-minute readContinue Reading
Toptal emblem

Toptal Talent Network Experts

Toptal Engineering Expert

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.
Read more

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

World-class articles, delivered weekly.

By entering your email, you are agreeing to our privacy policy.

Join the Toptal® community.