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Showing posts from January, 2020

UI Trends 2020: What's in Store?

The best UI trends are visually appealing while improving the usefulness and overall UX of a digital product. 2019 introduced some amazing UI design trends that will continue to be seen through 2020.

Bringing an Outsourced Finance Team In-house: A Toptal Case Study

LendEDU, a Y Combinator-backed startup, spent more than $50,000 on its outsourced finance department to create professional monthly financial statements. There was just one problem—they couldn’t trust the numbers.

Timestamp Truncation: A Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord Tale

Tests should keep apps from being flaky. But tests themselves can become flaky—even the most straightforward ones. Here's how we dove into a problematic test on a PostgreSQL-backed Rails app, and what we uncovered.

A Complete List of Project Management Conferences 2020

The only project management conference list you will ever need. This list contains all the information you might need when picking a conference including insights about the conference, locations, and ticket prices.

A New Brand with an Edge

Today is an exciting day at Toptal: We are announcing a new logo to complete our new brand!

Prominent Design Conferences 2020

Even the sharpest designers need to explore new ideas, learn about new techniques, and draw inspiration from other creatives to stay on top. We present a list of the most prominent design conferences to consider attending in 2020.

Imperfect Harmony: An Overview of SoundCloud vs. Spotify

Not many industries have undergone the same level of transformation as the music industry - technology has changed every facet of the industry. File streaming has been nothing short of a revolution. What can be learned from Spotify vs. SoundCloud?

Semi-supervised Image Classification with Unlabeled Data

Supervised learning is the key to computer vision and deep learning. However, what happens when you don’t have access to large, human-labeled datasets? In this article, Toptal Computer Vision Developer Urwa Muaz demonstrates the potential of semi-supervised image classification using unlabeled datasets.

Are Million-dollar Markets Better Than Billion-dollar Markets?

Entrepreneurs have been hardcoded to aim at billion-dollar sized markets with their solutions. However, such lucrative markets will appeal to many others and thus, are hard to succeed in. Going after smaller market sizes may be the more logical path to success.

Machine Language – A Guide to Chatbot Terminology (with Infographic)

Chatbots have unique abilities that humans don’t. When we regard them as tools, they provide business opportunities humans can’t. Unfortunately, when it comes to chatbot terminology, confusion reigns.

Stale-while-revalidate Data Fetching with React Hooks: A Guide

Inspired by stale-while-revalidate cache control logic, modern sites implement stale-while-refresh logic on the UI side. Thankfully, React Hooks make this logic painlessly reusable across components.

Doing Business in the European Union

The EU economy is worth $15.5 trillion, 24 million companies operate within it, and there are 300 million online shoppers. Is this a market you should be in? If so, how do you serve the EU market while balancing customer service, cost, and complexity?

Write Once, Deploy Everywhere: When to Go Native?

Writing multiple native applications for different mobile platforms can be a daunting task, but taking a non-native approach comes with pitfalls of its own. In this article, Toptal Mobile Developer Joel Frank outlines the concept of Write Once, Deploy Everywhere (WODE) and explains how to choose the right development path for your project.

All Together Now – An Overview of Inclusive Design

Using the inclusive design process helps designers consider a broad cross-section of human perspectives, abilities, and backgrounds to create products that make everyone feel included.

The Challenges of Initial Market Entry

Developing a market entry strategy is critical to any product. What might seem like an overnight success is a result of months and years of planning and hard work. But even the most prepared product managers face challenges when entering a new market.

How to Approach Financial Data Visualization

Looking to make your financial models more effective with better data visualization? Design principles can be effective tools in corporate decision-making.

UX Design Trends Retrospective 2019

Every year, popular UX design trends emerge and become popular because they provide better user experiences. This retrospective explores some of the most interesting and effective ones from 2019.

Language Server Protocol Tutorial: From VSCode to Vim

The main artifact of all your work is most likely plain text files. So why don't you use Notepad to create them? Find out how the Language Server Protocol can transform text editors into code editors, without coupling.

Pay in, Pay out: How to Create a Marketplace

Shopping online is more convenient than ever, so how do you create an online marketplace tailored to cater to your specific needs? In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Konrad Gadzinowski explores marketplace business models and payment methods for both regional and global services.

Mini Tutorial – Leveraging Figma’s Features for the Entire Design Process

Can one program handle the entire digital product design process? Learn how Figma, a web-based interface design tool, promotes collaboration, iteration, and documentation throughout the design process.

Unwrapping the Mysteries of Brand Valuation

Brand value is the value a business can sell an item above the price that the supply/demand curve dictates. This value is embedded into the company’s share price but can be uncovered using PEG analysis.

Mission Driven Development

Growing organizations often find that Scrum is no longer enough but switching to SAFe is too complicated. Mission Driven Development utilizes the 6-week cycle and offers a lightweight approach to scaling Agile.

The Efficient Approach - How to Design a Lean UX MVP

Think. Make. Check. The Lean UX process works well with the MVP process—Prototype, Measure, Learn. Combining Lean UX and MVP allows designers to create valuable products in less time, with less waste.

Keep It Encrypted, Keep It Safe: Working with ESNI, DoH, and DoT

Internet privacy's cutting-edge technology includes encrypted server name indication (ESNI) and encrypted DNS in the form of DNS over HTTPS (DoH). Find out what they are, why they exist, and how they work.

MCMC Methods: Metropolis-Hastings and Bayesian Inference

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods let us compute samples from a distribution even though we can’t do this relying on traditional methods. In this article, Toptal Data Scientist Divyanshu Kalra will introduce you to Bayesian methods and Metropolis-Hastings, demonstrating their potential in the field of probabilistic programming.