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.

A Remote Worker's Guide To Staying Healthy

There are a lot of developers who take good care of themselves and enjoy a healthy, active lifestyle. If you are one of them, you can skip the rest of this post, because I wrote it to help developers like myself, who could benefit from a healthier lifestyle.

Even if you are entirely focused on your career, and think you don’t have enough spare time to lead a healthy lifestyle, bear in mind that good physical health will also boost your productivity.

11 minute readContinue Reading
Victor Abadio

Victor Abadio

Victor is a front-end developer & wordPress specialist with 7+ years of experience as a freelancer. He has worked with agencies & start-ups.

Sass Style Guide: A Sass Tutorial on How to Write Better CSS Code

When working on big web applications as a team with other developers, code needs to be scalable and readable. This can be a challenging process when it comes to CSS, although preprocessors like Sass are available. But only using preprocessors will only get you so far. In this article, Toptal engineer Matias Hernandez presents a style guide with advice on how to improve the way you write your code.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Matias Hernandez

Matias Hernandez

Matías is a software engineer with more than 7 years of work as a freelancer for companies all around the globe.

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Embracing Sass: Why You Should Stop Using Vanilla CSS

CSS preprocessors have been around for quite a while now. These tools, among many things, promise convenience in writing style sheets for the web. However, not everyone is taking advantage of these utilities, and is still resorting to writing vanilla CSS. In this article, Toptal engineer Marcelo Mazza discusses some of the reasons why he thinks Sass is the way to go and why you should be using it in your projects.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Marcelo Mazza

Marcelo Mazza

Marcelo has 10+ years in UX, spanning various fields. He has solid knowledge of mobile platforms, UX, design, and front-end development

Things to Watch Out for While Working Remotely

Remote jobs can be good for you, but depending on your character, they can also have some unpleasant side effects. Burnout affects people in all walks of life and in all industries, so what makes remote workers different?

Recognizing burnout symptoms early is of vital importance, and I cannot stress this enough. The deeper you sink into it, the longer it will take to recover, it’s as simple as that.

14 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.

Automation in Selenium: Page Object Model and Page Factory

Proper test automation is a challenging yet essential ingredient for quality software applications. Explore maintainable test automation in Selenium, including Page Object model and Page Factory.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Dejan Zivanovic

Dejan Zivanovic

Dejan is a senior QA engineer with significant experience in web and mobile testing. He has also worked extensively on Android app development.

Software Development Anywhere: My Distributed Remote Workplace

Working as a remote software development freelancer has many benefits, but setting up an effective distributed working environment can be a real challenge. In this article, Toptal Engineer Ivan Voras describes how he leverages SSH and a number of related technologies, along with the Raspberry Pi and ownCloud, to be able to work effectively from anywhere.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Ivan Voras, PhD

Ivan Voras, PhD

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

Software Costs Estimation in Agile Project Management

One of the hardest things to do in software development is to determine how long and how much it will take to deliver a new software product. Should it be so hard? The answer is not straightforward.

19 minute readContinue Reading

Toptal Talent Network Experts

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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