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Showing posts from July, 2020

Robo-advisor Industry: Technological Efficiency or Risky Corner-cutting?

Robo-advisor investing uses algorithms (instead of humans) for portfolio selection and rebalancing. Its affordable ways have opened up wealth management options to the masses, but its means of quantifying risk need more sophistication and tailoring to individual circumstances.

React Test-driven Development: From User Stories to Production

Employing a test-driven development (TDD) approach in React projects tends to be straightforward, especially with the aid of Jest and Enzyme. However, there are a few things to look out for. In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Dave Hyungmok Lee demonstrates his React TDD process, from epics and user stories to development and production.

Design Constraints Are Not Restraints – They Stoke Creativity

Design constraints are clues. They help designers triangulate between the problems, resources, and criteria inherent in every project and prevent precious time wasted on extraneous design ideas.

A Complete Guide to Testing React Hooks

A relatively recent addition to React, Hooks have already changed React development for the better through improved code readability and state management. But how do we test them? In this article, Toptal React Developer Avi Aryan outlines why it is crucial to test hooks and introduces us to his React Hooks testing routine.

Financial Modeling Case Study: OOVA

Amy Divaraniya, CEO and co-founder of OOVA, created a product she knew the market needed. Yet, while she was pitching investors trying to close her seed round, she found that the financial projections needed a fresh pair of eyes.

Remote Brand Strategy Workshops: The Ultimate Step-by-step Guide

Brand strategy workshops align stakeholders and set the tone for the work that follows. Better still, they produce brands that go beyond aesthetic appeal to achieve business goals.

Building the Next Big Thing – A Guide to Business Idea Development

Business idea development for new venture concepts is a mixture of art and science. There are playbooks to follow that ensure ideas are validated objectively to ensure financial and opportunity cost risks are minimized.

Terraform vs. CloudFormation: The Definitive Guide

Choosing between infrastructure-as-code tools CloudFormation and Terraform can be arduous. It's helpful to have some advice from someone with practical experience scaling apps using both technologies.

Launching a Spring Boot Application Programmatically

Starting a Spring Boot application in the command line is as simple as it gets. But what if we want to run our application from another Java program? In this article, Toptal Java Developer Igor Delac demonstrates how you can start a Spring Boot app programmatically using just a few lines of code.

Serializing Complex Objects in JavaScript

The Tanagra.js library is designed to be simple and lightweight, and it currently supports Node.js and ES6 classes. The main implementation supports JSON, and an experimental version supports Google Protocol Buffers.

How to Prevent Feature Creep with User Story Best Practices

Designers should not rely on user stories alone to prevent feature creep. However, working with them provides the critical measurements designers need to deliver products with great user experiences.

Starting an App Business the Right Way

Building an app-based business can be a daunting project: Within such a competitive space, how can you make your app stand out, attract and retain the right audience, and then monetize it?

Optimizing Retailer Revenue with Sales Forecasting AI

Retailers often face supply and demand issues that cause them to miss out on potential sales or tie up a lot of money in overstocked products. In this article, Toptal Data Scientist Ahmed Khaled explains how retailers can boost revenues and cut costs with sales forecasts backed by artificial intelligence.

K8s/Kubernetes: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

Kubernetes ("K8s") won the battle of container orchestration tools. Now AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each offer a managed Kubernetes version. How do they compare?