Toptal Blog

E-commerce sales are expected to more than double by 2021. E-commerce retailers and designers who pay close attention to user experience and follow e-commerce UX design principles can capitalize on this growth.

Asynchronous programming used to be a challenge even for seasoned professionals, leading to aptly named phenomena like Callback Hell.

In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Demir Selmanovic explains how async functions took us out of purgatory and why you should be using them.

Redesigning a website is about more than making cosmetic changes; it’s about identifying the real issues that the business is facing and solving them with design.

So, you’ve decided to get exposure to cryptocurrencies. In this newer space, a personal financial advisor may not be of great help. Neither will your banker, unless you are a customer of a limited number of progressive Swiss private banks, which facilitate crypto trading. What now?

This article provides practical information and resources around passive vs. active cryptocurrency investing, how to buy, sell, store, and monitor cryptocurrencies, as well as tax regulations in the space.

Fragment caching in Rails provides an easy yet a powerful way of improving your application’s performance. However, some real-world scenarios do not work quite well with how the Rails cache behaves by default.

In this article, Toptal Ruby on Rails Developer Orban Botond shows how you can implement a small DSL to optimize how the cache for related entities is invalidated to improve template rendering performance.

How are blockchain applications starting to help enterprises solve complex, costly problems? Saurin Patel, Client Partner at Toptal, provides a comprehensive, non-technical overview of blockchain as an enabling technology for the enterprise, and highlights recent use cases of the world’s leading companies harnessing the fledgling technology’s great potential.

Millions of Americans depend on continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) for care as they age. In addition to living accommodations and medical services, these facilities also offer complex embedded insurance products that are improperly underwritten and insufficiently regulated.

As a result, many CCRCs are actuarially insolvent, creating a systemic risk that could leave many ageing residents financially and medically exposed at the end of their lives. Management Consultant, Jack Barker, takes us through these sector challenges and shares a proprietary capitalization model that could potentially help alleviate the issues.

For designers, working in enterprise is a challenge because of all the different stakeholders and moving parts. This guide reviews the collaborative design process for working better in that environment.

Designing systems integration architecture can be a difficult task. And it gets worse if you’re designing for software at scale. An enterprise service bus can be one way of working around the challenges. But this is definitely not the simplest of solutions.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Anton Goncharov gives us a detailed overview of the challenges of systems integration and a guide to addressing those challenges with Apache Camel.