Toptal Blog

Craft by InVision LABS is a powerful suite of plugins for Sketch. Learn how to super-charge your process and streamline collaboration for your remote team.

Through its acquisition of Whole Foods, Amazon is not only likely to disrupt the grocery shopping experience but is perhaps embarking on a grander push that could change the entire retail landscape, leaving Walmart on the back foot.

Remote UX workshops call for meticulous preparation and the use of proven techniques as complex details make it a challenge with many potential pitfalls.

Dropwizard allows developers to quickly bootstrap their projects and package applications as easily deployable standalone services. It also happens to be relatively simple to use and implement.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Dusan Simonovic will introduce you to Dropwizard and demonstrate how you can use this powerful framework to create RESTful web services with ease.

Docker itself has been around for years and is composed of many inter-operating pieces. One of them is Docker Swarm, which allows you to declare your applications as stacks of services, and let Docker handle the rest.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Luke Sapan explains how to use Docker Swarm to deploy your own self-managing stack, followed by a quick example.

Build a bot that analyzes the sentiment of incoming email messages using Recursive Neural Tensor Networks from the Stanford NLP library.

These 10 surprising UX books from various disciplines will broaden a designer’s perspective and provide insight into diverse approaches to problem solving.

The Glass-Steagall Act, Depression-era legislation, has had a controversial, unconventional run. 80 years after its inception, it’s made its way back into public discourse. This article examines the historical context of the Act, its erosion, and its repeal, as well as its impact on the financial crisis.

Spring Batch is a lightweight, comprehensive framework designed to facilitate the development of robust batch applications. It’s easy to set up, and even easier to use.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Alexey Saenko explains the programming model and the domain language of batch applications, using detailed code examples that should help any developer looking to get a head start in Spring Batch.

Knowledge of CSS is a fundamental skill in the web development space. However, implementing certain web design patterns with just CSS can be a frustrating task, and often requires an in-depth understanding of it.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Web Developer Rico Mossesgeld shares several CSS tips and tricks that take advantage of lesser known CSS features to solve real layout and design problems.

Framer, the most powerful interactive prototyping tool, just became even more powerful with their latest release. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create prototypes in Framer the same way Uber, Dropbox, and Google do.

Many newcomers to venture capital fail to appreciate some of the nuances that distinguishes venture investing from traditional forms of financial investing. This article delves into three areas in particular that new venture investors should look to understand.

Video accounts for more than three quarters of all bandwidth used today. That’s why developers need a solid, extensible, and advanced media framework that doesn’t come with a steep learning curve.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Raul Jimenez will introduce you to one such framework – Videogular. If you need to harness the power of Angular for HTML5 video, look no further.

In this tutorial, we will give a simple breakdown of the steps that you need to create an animated explainer video like the slick masterpieces built by Slack.

Twitter is a goldmine of data. Unlike other social platforms, almost every user’s tweets are completely public and pullable.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Anthony Sistilli will be exploring how you can use Python, the Twitter API, and data mining techniques to gather useful data.

Recently, I was challenged to create my own grid system and, since re-inventing the wheel is always useful as a learning experience, I went for it. I knew it would be an interesting challenge, but I was surprised by how easy it turned out to be!

Interaction design principles form the bedrock of awesome UX. Truly great interaction design relies on a set of conventions, standards, best practices and rules-of-thumb.

The private equity industry is showing signs of maturity as record competition amongst funds and record-high levels of dry powder, combined with strong competition from cash-rich corporates, have driven valuations to levels that make it difficult to see how returns could remain competitive.

There is no way around application diagnostics. No matter how good your code is, you will need to be able to monitor and study system behavior. This is where Android’s DDMS shines.

In this article, Senior Android Engineer Gilad Haimov explains how veteran Android developers leverage the potential of DDMS to improve app stability and performance, test new features, diagnose, and debug their code.

Why does a React web app run slow? The answer often lies in when and how frequently your components re-render, and whether those re-renders were even necessary. React doesn’t promise magical performance gains, but it provides just the right tools and functionalities to make it easy.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer William Wang walks us through some optimization techniques that can help you build performant React web apps.

The relationship between art and design is often misunderstood, and although a design outcome can be artful, the process behind it is altogether very different.