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.

Ultimate Guide to the Processing Language Part I: The Fundamentals

Rapid prototyping and the ability to produce quick visual results are features of many programming languages and frameworks. However, some take it even further by making these their primary goals. Processing, a programming language based on Java, allows its users to code within the context of visual arts and has been designed from the ground up to provide instant visual feedback. In this article, Toptal engineer Oguz Gelal provides a gentle introduction to Processing and some insights into its inner mechanics.

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Oguz Gelal

Oguz Gelal

Oguz is a software engineer and full-stack web developer. He has worked with a number of frameworks and tools, fron- and back-end.

iOS 9 Betas And WatchOS 2 For Developers

Apple’s iOS 9 and WatchOS 2 updates brings a number of novel features, including improved multitasking for iPads and a host of aesthetic tweaks. However, while iOS 9 is just an incremental update with a focus on the new iPad Pro, WatchOS 2 is not a skin-deep update. Apple has changed the WatchOS architecture and opened up a range of new possibilities for developers.

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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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Going Real-Time with Redis Pub/Sub

Real-time applications have already started to dominate the landscape of the Internet. With modern frameworks and standardization of the necessary client-side features, building a real-time web application has become a breeze. However, such web applications still pose unique scalability challenges.

In this article, Toptal engineer Mahmud Ridwan explores the architecture of a simple real-time web application that works using Redis Pub/Sub and doesn’t compromise its horizontal scalability.

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Mahmud Ridwan

Mahmud Ridwan

Mahmud is a software developer with many years of experience and a knack for efficiency, scalability, and stable solutions.

Impostor Syndrome: How I Fool My Bosses, and You Too

By and large, I haven’t run into any major disadvantages or advantages to being a woman in the software field. I feel like that’s a story not told enough in the debate, where the experience is just like anything else in life: some good, some bad, overall average.

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Kate Scheer

Kate Scheer

A true multipotentialite, Kate has worked as a video game artist, full-stack developer, movie script author, tech editor, and animal vet.

Online Video with Wowza and Amazon Elastic Transcoder

Performance and data interoperability are critical to the success of any web application. For web apps that need to support video processing – which is inherently compute- and I/O-intensive – these challenges are particularly acute. In this post, I describe some of my experience successfully incorporating video capabilities into a PHP-based web app, leveraging open source technologies and cloud-based services to the greatest extent possible.

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Krzysztof Ożóg

Krzysztof Ożóg

Krzysztof is a skilled Symfony developer with excellent knowledge of Symfony 2, Symfony 3, PHP, and OOP coding.

Slow Android Wear Adoption Is Stifling Development

Several factors conspired to stifle Android Wear growth, ranging from lack of Google development, to inadequate hardware. Some of these problems have been addressed, some are being addressed, while others cannot be addressed with currently available technology.

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Nermin Hajdarbegovic

Nermin Hajdarbegovic

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

Ruby Metaprogramming Is Even Cooler Than It Sounds

Ruby metaprogramming, one of the most interesting aspects of Ruby, enables the programming language to achieve an extreme level of expressiveness. It is because of this very feature that many gems, such as RSpec and ActiveRecord, can work the way they do. In this article, Toptal engineer Nikola Todorovic demystifies Ruby metaprogramming using some examples that are relevant to everyday programming and aims to bring it closer to average Ruby developers.

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Nikola Todorovic

Nikola Todorovic

Nikola has an MCE degree and almost a decade of experience in software development. His passions are Ruby on Rails and startups.

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
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