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.

Android Developer’s Guide to the Google Location Services API

Location-based applications on our mobile devices have changed the way we interact with mobile technology. The list of these applications is extensive and has had a major impact on our lives.

This article walks us through a step-by-step tutorial of how to determine the location of an Android device using Google Location Services API.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Danny Gonzalez

Danny Gonzalez

Danny is a full-stack software engineer with 7+ years of experience doing project management and building web and mobile applications.

Android Testing Tutorial: Unit Testing Like a True Green Droid

The extremely diverse and fragmented Android ecosystem poses certain challenges when it comes to testing. In this article, we take a look at some approaches that can be effective with tackling these challenges and ease the process of writing and automating tests.

12 minute readContinue Reading
Marko Vitas

Marko Vitas

A senior Android developer with a CS degree, Marko has 6+ years of experience in app development, including a secure mobile banking app.

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Biometric Security—the Key to Passwordless Authentication or a Fad?

Passwordless authentication has been the Holy Grail of security for years, but progress has been painfully slow. Until a few years ago, the technology to implement passwordless logins on a grand scale simply wasn’t available.

However, the industry juggernaut is slowly but surely changing this. There are a few technical, legal and even ethical considerations to take into account, but be as it may, biometric, passwordless authentication is here to stay.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Nermin Hajdarbegović

Nermin Hajdarbegović

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

A Digital Nomad Adventure: Traveling with Hacker Paradise

The nomadic lifestyle is not a vacation. There remains an impermeable barrier between the work world within the computer, and the real world outside of it. Yet there is so much intellectual stimulation and inspiration to be found on the road, it’s a genuine shame that we can’t build on it in the work we do, and with those we find around us. Making that dream a reality is the goal of Casey Rosengren and Alexey Komissarouk, founders of Hacker Paradise.

12 minute readContinue Reading
Nick McCrea

Nick McCrea

Nicholas is a professional software engineer with a passion for quality craftsmanship. He loves architecting and writing top-notch code.

Toptal and Facebook - Creating a Global Virtual Office

Toptal has taken its place as one of the strategic partners in Facebook’s effort to connect the world. Our vision of a distributed and office-less company with developers spread all over the globe has proven to be an amazing match to Facebook’s attempts to connect people worldwide.

5 minute readContinue Reading
Demir Selmanovic

Demir Selmanovic

Demir is a developer and project manager with over 15 years of professional experience in a wide range of software development roles.

Learn Markdown: The Writing Tool for Software Developers

Face it, you’re a software engineer, not a graphic designer. When you need to write a manual, technical document, or report, you just want to write it and be done with it. Especially for you as a software engineer – who is not put off by needing to learn and use some basic syntax conventions – Markdown can be the path of least resistance between what you want to write and getting it written.

6 minute readContinue Reading
Storm Farrell

Storm Farrell

Storm is a front-end developer with 7+ years of experience and a focus on UI/UX, JavaScript and React.

The Top 10 Most Common Mistakes That Node.js Developers Make

Node.js, the cross-platform runtime environment, has seen its fair share of praise and criticism for what it offers to developers. Often, reasons for such criticisms are rooted in how developers use/misuse the language.

This article explores ten common mistakes that Node.js developers make and how to avoid them.

11 minute readContinue Reading
Mahmud Ridwan

Mahmud Ridwan

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

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
13 minute readContinue Reading

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