Toptal Blog

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.

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.

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.

Once crammed into stuffy showrooms with eager salespeople and a dizzying plethora of models, mattress purchases used to be notoriously complicated. However, a upstarts have recently revitalized the industry with innovations in marketing, delivery, and a direct-to-consumer model.

It’s true that the mattress industry is experiencing an upheaval, but rather than the typical narrative of newer operations completely displacing older ones, perhaps there’s room for both collaboration and innovation. There are lessons for investors, entrepreneurs, and corporate moguls alike.

Gestalt principles are an important set of ideas for any designer. Implementing them greatly improves the aesthetics, functionality, and user-friendliness of a design.

As applications become more complex, having good logs can be very useful, not only when debugging but also to provide insight in application issue/performance. The Python standard library includes the Python logging module that provides most of the basic logging features. But this handy logging module in Python also contains some quirks that can cause hours of headaches.

Professional sports franchises continue to see record sale prices. But what drives a team like the Dallas Cowboys, who haven’t won a Super Bowl in over 20 years, to top the list of the most valuable sports franchises in the United States?

In this article, Toptal Management Consultant David Turney provides an overview of professional sports economics, unique valuation considerations, and a team valuation example.

UI and UX are two design terms that often get used in the wrong context. Designers who call themselves “UI designers,” or design for trends rather than users, could be harming their reputation.

Interacting with a real database during integration and end-to-end testing can pose distinct challenges. An effective workaround is to use an in-memory database that integrates seamlessly with your testing framework and provides APIs for manipulating state directly from your test code.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Mikhail Angelov demonstrates how to do just that—and how to write straightforward integration and end-to-end tests for Node.js and MongoDB applications without the need for complicated setup/teardown code.