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.

Management consultant 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.

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.

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.

Technology innovations stand to benefit patients and the healthcare system in two dramatic ways. Already several examples of such innovation are driving improved patient outcomes while simultaneously reducing the cost to deliver care. In this article, we explore three diverse examples, each poised to impact patients, providers and payers.

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.

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.

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.

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.