Toptal Blog

From abstract spreadsheets to real-world application, financial models have become an inextricable part of business life and an indispensable part of every company’s toolkit. But irrespective of its ubiquitousness as a productivity and decision-making tool, many out there still have a love-hate relationship with it.

Finance expert Alberto Bazzana authors a comprehensive “how-to guide”, for both the novices and experts among us, detailing Wall Street’s best practices for intelligent, effective, and error-free financial modeling.

In this age of lean startups, designers often find themselves in stretch roles where they are not only in charge of a product’s design but also in charge of coming up with the type of product to build.

When using a JavaScript framework, your browser doesn’t receive a complete page to display. Instead it gets a bunch of pieces and instructions of how to put them all together. It takes a substantial amount of time to put all this information together before your browser actually has something to display.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Front-end Engineer Ben Jones introduces us to Nuxt.js, a server-side rendering library for Vue.js, inspired by the popular Next.js for React.js.

Every month, we bring you riveting design news and inspiring content focused on design. Here are five hand-picked pieces of design news.

To unlock growth in a company, you must first find the KPI that is core towards increasing company value. More effective knowledge of growth comes from a deeper understanding of the characteristics of a “perfect client,” the trends between user cohorts, and finding the tipping point that solidifies retention and engagement.

The best landing pages increase conversions and help brands sell more. But what makes great landing page design? Read and uncover valuable insights for any business looking for a world-class landing page.

Deep learning has proven its power across many domains, from beating humans at complex board games to synthesizing music. It has also been used extensively in natural language processing.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun (Sean) Wang shows how easy it is to build a text classification program using different techniques and how well they perform against each other.

Rails ships with everything you need to prototype your application quickly, but when your codebase starts growing, you’ll run into scenarios where the conventional Fat Model, Skinny Controller mantra breaks. When your business logic can’t fit in either a model or a controller, that’s when service objects come in and let us separate every business action into its own Ruby object.

While growing investor enthusiasm has contributed to a historic $3 trillion of fundraising over the last five years, the PE industry faces increasing competition amongst firms, record-high multiples and other factors making it difficult to generate attractive returns. One aspect for consideration is succession planning, especially since CEO turnover at portfolio companies occurs at a rate of 73% and can increase hold times and decrease returns.

This article defines succession planning, and examines the best practices and mistakes to avoid in succession planning for PE portfolio companies. It also explores succession planning within private equity firms themselves, something PE firms have been uncharacteristically proactive about confronting recently.

80% of businesses fail in their first year—a majority of these casualties are due to a lack of customer research. Effective customer development interviews can help validate product ideas before moving forward.

Great emotional design creates a bond between the consumer and the brand—creating an emotional connection to your target market translates into conversions and sales as well as online and offline interactions.

Spring Integration enables lightweight messaging within Spring-based applications.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Adnan Kukuljac shows how Spring Integration with Redis makes it easy to build a microservice architecture.

The origins of family office investing date back, colorfully, to at least 15th century Florence, when the Medicis auspiciously gave the likes of Michelangelo and Da Vinci their start. Fast forward to present day, family offices have quietly continued to rival household VC names in the capital structures of the world’s largest tech companies (Uber, Facebook, and WeWork, for example).

Finance Expert Vidur Gupta presents a captivating introductory piece on the secretive but potent world of family office investing.

A lion’s share of websites and apps in the online media space are powered by content management systems (CMS). The optimal way to design for these applications is putting content first, style second.

Go is quickly becoming one of the most popular languages: It currently ranks 19 in the TIOBE programming community index, and powers popular software like Kubernetes, Docker, and Heroku CLI. However, for all its simplicity, Go may still be missing some things.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Go Developer Sergei Peshkov shares his concerns about why Go is still far from perfect and how we can make it better.

Visual design experiments often become popular design trends and suddenly they are seen everywhere. Here are a number of hot graphic design trends and some of the top tutorials on how to create them.

Online users are becoming increasingly resistant to traditional email/password registration processes. One-click social logins via Facebook, Google, or GitHub are better, but they come with data privacy trade-offs.

This article introduces a one-click, cryptographically-secure login flow using MetaMask, with all data stored on the app’s own back-end.

Machine learning, combined with some standard image processing techniques, can result in powerful video analysis tools.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michael Karchevsky walks through a solution for a machine learning competition that identifies the species and lengths of any fish present in a given video segment.

As a good JavaScript developer, you strive to write clean, healthy, and maintainable code. While you solve interesting and unique challenges, you’ve likely found that you’re often writing code that looks similar to the code for an entirely different problem you’ve handled before. You may not know it, but you’ve used a design pattern.

Technical debt, which relates to suboptimal technology infrastructure in an organization, can actually be a huge financial burden on a business. However, like traditional financial debt, there are steps and processes that can be taken to manage and mitigate the risk. In this article, we elaborate on how CFOs can tackle their technical debt burden.

Conversion optimization doesn’t simply boil down to using trendy colors on CTA buttons. Leverage usability data to improve customer experience that will make a larger, more lasting impact on conversion than any fad.