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

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.

Eliminating the Garbage Collector: The RAII Way

Manual memory management is a nightmare that programmers have been inventing ways to avoid since the invention of the compiler. Programming languages with garbage collectors make life easier, but at the cost of performance.

In this article, Toptal engineer Peter Goodspeed-Niklaus gives us a peek into the history of garbage collectors and explains how notions of ownership and borrowing can help eliminate garbage collectors without compromising their safety guarantees.

13 minute readContinue Reading
Peter Goodspeed-Niklaus

Peter Goodspeed-Niklaus

Peter, BSc (with distinction), is a professional Python/Django developer who has also written an exotic processor emulator in Rust.

Caching in Spring with EhCache Annotations

EhCache is a widely used, pure Java cache that can be easily integrated with most popular Java frameworks, such as Spring and Hibernate. It is often considered to be the most convenient choice for Java applications since it can be integrated into projects easily. EhCache Spring Annotations allows seamless integration into any Spring application by simply adding annotations to cacheable methods without modifying the method implementations. This article focuses on boosting your Spring applications with EhCache Spring Annotations.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Cong Liu

Cong Liu

Cong (MScEng) is a fast learner with a passion for performant code. He’s an expert in Android and web service development and loves AR.

World-class articles, delivered weekly.

Subscription implies consent to our privacy policy

Google Cardboard Overview: VR On The Cheap

Google Cardboard was envisioned as the cheapest Virtual Reality (VR) solution on the planet, and at this point, nothing else comes close in terms of pricing. However, the low price did not bring about mass adoption, and Google’s Android-based VR platform is nothing more than a tech curiosity at this point.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic leverages his extensive experience in the graphics industry to explain what’s keeping Cardboard VR down, and what the platform needs to attract more users, investment, and development.

20 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.

Creating Usable JVM Languages: An Overview

Java Virtual Machine (JVM), the powerful virtual machine behind programming languages like Java and Scala, provides a platform-independent environment for executing compiled bytecode. Programming languages built for the JVM can be used to write programs that can run on a wide range of platforms without modification and can even leverage all the libraries and frameworks that exist for the JVM.

In this article, Toptal engineer Federico Tomassetti presents an overview of the strategy and various tools involved in creating our very own programming language for the JVM.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Federico Tomassetti

Federico Tomassetti

Federico has worked for TripAdvisor and Groupon. He has a PhD in software engineering and works in Java, Ruby, Python, Scala, and Haskell.

Guide to Multi-processing Network Server Models

In this article, Toptal engineer Ivan Voras provides a useful overview and comparison of multi-processing network server models, with the goal being to take some of the mystery out of writing high performance networking code. The article is intended for “system programmers”, i.e., back-end developers who will work with the low-level details of their applications, implementing network server code.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Ivan Voras, PhD

Ivan Voras, PhD

Ivan’s 15+ years of back-end and blockchain architecture has seen everything from DBA ops to development of OS kernel modules (FreeBSD).

REST Security With JWT Using Java and Spring Security

Although the old, standardized security approaches work with REST services, they all have problems that could be avoided by using a better standard. For this, JWT arrives just in time to save the day.

In this article, Toptal engineer Dejan Milosevic guides us on how to implement a JWT token-based REST API using Java and Spring Security.

11 minute readContinue Reading
Dejan Milosevic

Dejan Milosevic

Dejan has significant experience working with top Java and JavaScript frameworks and a complimentary fluency in the DB layer.

WSGI: The Server-Application Interface for Python

Nowadays, almost all Python frameworks use WSGI as a means, if not the only means, to communicate with their web servers. This is how Django, Flask, and many other popular frameworks do it.

This article intends to provide readers with a glimpse into how WSGI works and allow them to build a simple WSGI application or server.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Leandro Lima

Leandro Lima

Leandro has 15+ years in IT/development. Working with Python since 2013, he loves building efficient and cost-effective systems.

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.
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.

Subscription implies consent to our privacy policy

Join the Toptal® community.