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.

authors 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.

Featured in

authors 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.

Optimize Your Environment for Development and Production: A Pydantic Tutorial, Part 2

Learn how to develop a Django application coupled with pydantic where the development environment matches production.

9 minute readContinue Reading

Arjaan Buijk

Arjaan is a senior engineer and data scientist who creates mission-critical cloud solutions focused on Rasa for international banks and insurance companies. He architects and teaches large-scale Kubernetes solutions.

An In-depth Look at C++ vs. Java

Deciding on a language can be intimidating when you don’t have deep experience with the available options. This comparison explores the fundamental differences between C++ and Java, and what to consider when choosing between them.

10 minute readContinue Reading

Timothy Mensch

Timothy is an experienced software architect who has created multiple game engines with C++, including one used in more than 100 titles. His extensive background in Java ranges from Android game and application development to industry experience at Amazon, building an Android client for the AWS AppStream service. He has used more than 20 programming languages in his career, several of which he custom created to meet a specific need.

World-class articles, delivered weekly.

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

Understanding Twitter Dynamics With R and Gephi: Text Analysis and Centrality

Centrality and text analysis allow users to get more out of their social network data. Here’s how you can leverage them using R and Gephi.

12 minute readContinue Reading

Juan Manuel Ortiz de Zarate

Juan is a developer, data scientist, and doctoral researcher at the University of Buenos Aires where he studies social networks, AI, and NLP. Juan has more than a decade of data science experience and has published papers at ML conferences, including SPIRE and ICCS.

Streamline Your Django Settings With Type Hints: A Pydantic Tutorial, Part 1

Python and pydantic make a powerful runtime combination when validating data and settings, resulting in reduced debugging and a simplified code base.

6 minute readContinue Reading

Arjaan Buijk

PageSpeed Insights Best Practices: Acing Google’s Assessment

Page speed is an important ranking attribute for search engines, making performance optimization a prerequisite for successful sites. Here’s how Google PageSpeed Insights can help identify and rectify performance issues.

11 minute readContinue Reading

Timofey Bugaevsky

Timofey is a CTO and veteran full-stack engineer with over 18 years of experience developing new products and sustaining existing ones. He holds an Engineer’s Degree in Robotics and an MBA.

Working With TypeScript and Jest Support: An AWS SAM Tutorial

JavaScript boilerplate is easy enough to come by, but there’s a bit more to starting AWS SAM projects with TypeScript. Here’s how to create an AWS SAM TypeScript project from scratch with Jest support.

10 minute readContinue Reading

Mohammad Faisal

Mohammad is a full-stack developer who has architected several applications on AWS using Lambda, NoSQL, and Node.js. He has extensive experience in optimizing AWS infrastructure for midsized companies.

C# vs. C++: What’s at the Core?

C# and C++ share a similar syntax but cater to different requirements, so which should you focus on? This article examines each language’s features and weighs the pros and cons.

7 minute readContinue Reading

Jakiša Tomić

Jakiša is a veteran full-stack developer with more than 15 years of experience creating C# and C++ apps on multiple platforms. His portfolio includes work with the Windows API, embedded programming, distributed systems, mixed reality, and DevOps. Jakiša has a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Zagreb.

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.