Toptal Blog

Due in part to the unceremonial nature of its title, the value-creation potential of business plan consultants is often misunderstood and underappreciated. Questions such as, “What do they do that I can’t?”, “Why do they cost so much?” and, “Don’t you think we can handle this ourselves?”, all too often haunt their practice.

Having prolifically added value to 25+ clients across a range of industries, sizes, and mandates, Toptal Finance Expert, Josh Chapman, sheds light on the full scope of business plan consulting. What it is to be a great business plan consultant, how they create value, and what skills, attributes and experiences constitute the greats vs. the pretenders.

ClojureScript and its multiparadigm approach (with an emphasis on functional programming) may sound esoteric to some front-end developers. But it’s amazing to work with, and getting started with it is far simpler than one might imagine. In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Clojure Developer Luke Tomlin shows off some key features, getting straight into a React demo using Reagent and the Hiccup syntax.

A decidedly less sexy, albeit critical, part of a CFO’s job description is working capital management and optimization. There are countless examples of companies that are forced to incur unnecessary debt and other financial obligations to meet their short-term financing needs, when in fact ample cash is sitting idly stuck in working capital.

But working capital optimization is hard to get right and often requires significant cross-functional efforts to execute effectively. In this article, Toptal Finance Expert Emilio Labrador draws on 25 years of professional experience across multiple industries to outline some of his main suggestions and approaches on how to tackle working capital management projects.

Design critiques are a key part of the product design process that encourage collaboration and improve ideas. This guide will help designers conduct productive, efficient critiques for actionable feedback.

In K-12 education, end-of-year student tests drive crucial decisions for teachers and policymakers. But these assessments are profoundly flawed ways of measuring student growth and achievement. This article explores the ways in which technology can improve such assessments, as well as the K-12 classroom experience as a whole.

Moving to a microservices architecture often raises the question: What is the best environment to stabilize services? Here’s how and why you should use Kubernetes, Docker, and CircleCI to containerize and deploy apps.

Renewable energy generation, lead by solar PV and wind power, is growing at a considerable rate. Innovations are lowering the cost to generate such power to levels of traditional fossil fuels. Yet underneath the positive headlines, there are some fundamental issues that remain in the long-term sustainability of business models in the industry.

Learn the value of minimum viable prototypes (MVPrs), a quick and affordable way to create, launch, test, and improve digital products based on real-world insights.

Augmented reality and virtual reality are becoming mainstream and easily available.

In this article, Toptal Freelance iOS Developer Altaibayar Tseveenbayar showcases a demo app for adding virtual objects to a video feed using ARKit.