Toptal Blog

The Toptal Blog is the top hub for developers, designers, management consultants, executives, and entrepreneurs, featuring key technology updates, tutorials, freelancer resources, and management insights.

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Toptal core team members share their experience, expertise, and perspectives on the Toptal Edge Blog

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Machine Learning Video Analysis: Identifying Fish

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.

5-minute readContinue Reading
Michael Karchevsky

Michael Karchevsky

Michael is an experienced Python, OpenCV, and C++ developer. He’s particularly interested in machine learning and computer vision.

The Financial Implications of Technical Debt

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.

13-minute readContinue Reading
Erik Frederick

Erik Frederick

Erik is a seasoned CFO and expert in profitability management, financial modelling and FP&A. He was CFO of a $1.8Bn unit of Staples.

The Comprehensive Guide to JavaScript Design Patterns

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.

22-minute readContinue Reading
Marko Mišura

Marko Mišura

Having worked as a full stack software engineer, Marko is an expert at design, implementation and maintenance of web systems.

Waking Up a Sleeping Industry: Mattress Industry Disruption

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.

19-minute readContinue Reading
Melissa Lin

Melissa Lin

Melissa has worked in ECM, tech startups, and management consulting, advising Fortune 500 companies across multiple sectors.

Exploring the Gestalt Principles of Design

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

8-minute readContinue Reading
Miklos Philips

Miklos Philips

Miklos is a senior UI/UX and product designer with more than 20 years of experience in the design field. His past work includes complex data UIs, data visualization, dashboards and reporting, transactional interfaces, design system creation, and product design consulting services for companies like Autodesk and the Financial Times.

Python Logging: An In-Depth Tutorial

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.

6-minute readContinue Reading
Son Nguyen Kim

Son Nguyen Kim

Son is highly skilled with software engineering and ML algorithms and always tries hard to tackle problems with a simple approach.

Professional Sports Franchise Valuation

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.

23-minute readContinue Reading
David Turney

David Turney

David specializes in managing complex/unique projects for C-Suite executives at Fortune 500 companies. He has managed transactions > $1.5Bn.

Never Call Yourself a UI Designer: UI is UX

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.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Daniel Schwarz

Daniel Schwarz

Daniel is a designer and developer by background, but also a 3x author, a collaborator with Adobe and InVision, and a design blog editor.

Integration and End-to-End Tests Made Easy With Node.js and MongoDB

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.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Mikhail Angelov

Mikhail Angelov

Mikhail is a full-stack engineer specializing in JavaScript, React, Node.js, Flux, and Redux. His industry experience spans firmware, mobile, and web development in areas including finance, insurance, and transportation technology. He also holds a master’s degree in physics.

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