Toptal Blog

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.

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.

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.