Toptal Engineering Blog

Bootstrap, one of the most used HTML/CSS/JavaScript front-end frameworks, offers a little more than just fancy customizable user interface elements. It provides a great starting point for many types of projects, a plethora of components, and many nifty styles predefined for responsive layout and utility classes to help keep your HTML and CSS code clean.

In this article, Toptal designer Lijana Saniukaite walks us through some practical Bootstrap tips and best practices to speed up your application development.

Memory leaks in long running Node.js applications are like ticking time bombs that, if left unchecked in production environments, can result in devastating outcomes. These bugs are often considered to be hard to find. However, with the right tools and a strategic approach, memory leaks can not only be solved but also avoided in the future. In this article, Toptal engineer Vladyslav Millier gives us insight into what memory leaks are, how some sophisticated debugging tools can be used to find memory leaks, and how to plug them once and for all.

The fact that women are underrepresented in tech is nothing new. However, while we’ve seen the gender diversity reports from companies like Google, Facebook, and many more, a look at the number of women in the open source community suggests that the numbers might be worse than these reports imply. In this post, Toptal COO Breanden Beneschott shares the results of a study looking at gender on GitHub and considers a few reasons why GitHub is so male-dominated, including a few ideas on how we can make the open source community a more welcoming place.

The GWT Web Toolkit, formerly known as Google Web Toolkit, is a set of development tools for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications using the Java programming language. What makes GWT not “yet another Java tool to write web apps,” is the fact that the heart of the toolkit is a compiler that converts Java into JavaScript, enabling developers to write front-end web applications while leveraging all of Java’s strengths.

Many developers often overlook, or do not thoroughly think through the implications of open source licenses. Whether you’re planning to open source your own project under one of these licenses, or you intend to integrate some other open source project into one of your own, it’s important to have at least some knowledge of what these licenses are, how they may affect your projects, and how they complement or contradict one another. In this article, Toptal engineer David Marín gives us a comprehensive guide to some of the most popular open source licenses, and several rules of thumb to follow when choosing a license for future open source projects.

When Mike Bostock created D3.js, he introduced a tried and true reusable charts pattern for implementing the same chart in any number of selections. However, the limitations of this pattern are realized once the chart is initialized. In this article, Toptal engineer Rob Moore presents a revised reusable charts pattern that leverages the full power of D3.js.

Today, we will be taking a look at the future of mobile payments and emerging opportunities for developers. Needless to say, with each new opportunity, developers will have to face new challenges.

However, since we are talking about money, I don’t think anyone expects a shortage of software developers eager to learn a few new tricks and get into this space.