Toptal Blog

The Toptal Blog is the top hub for developers, designers, finance experts, 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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Investing in Cryptocurrencies: The Ultimate Guide

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.

18 minute readContinue Reading
Raphael Rottgen, CFA FRM

Raphael Rottgen, CFA FRM

Raphael is a partner at a crypto hedge fund. Prior, he founded and exited a fintech company, and worked as a banker and equities investor.

Field-level Rails Cache Invalidation: A DSL Solution

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.

7 minute readContinue Reading
Botond Orban

Botond Orban

Botond is a skilled developer who enjoys writing readable code. He learnt to program at 13 on a ZX Spectrum-compatible Russian PC.

Beyond Crypto: Blockchain Applications Deliver Enterprise Solutions

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.

11 minute readContinue Reading
Saurin Patel

Saurin Patel

Saurin comes from a background combining extensive IT consulting and strategy experience. Having earned a BSE in computer engineering at Lehigh University, Saurin began his career at Accenture and Slalom Consulting, where he led global IT teams spanning the U.S., India, and Philippines. Subsequently, Saurin joined XO communications, where he reported directly to the CIO as Director of IT Strategy and Transformation. He was responsible for IT Solution Architecture, Enterprise Data Warehouse, Data Integration, and Business Intelligence systems.

The Looming Crisis in Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs)

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. Finance Expert, Jack Barker, takes us through these sector challenges and shares a proprietary capitalization model that could potentially help alleviate the issues.

14 minute readContinue Reading
Jack Barker

Jack Barker

Jack is an ex-McKinsey, ex-Carlyle Principal/Partner with > 30 years of international finance accross telecoms, FIG and industrials.

Collaborative Design: A Guide to Successful Enterprise Product Design

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.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Andi Omtvedt

Andi Omtvedt

Andi has 10+ years experience as a user experience designer and information architect for enterprise web applications.

Streamline Software Integration: An Apache Camel Tutorial

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.

18 minute readContinue Reading
Anton Goncharov

Anton Goncharov

Anton has extensive expertise in designing robust and scalable applications. He’s fluent in Java/Spring stack and JavaScript development.

The Fundamental Guide to Mobile Usability

Mobile usability isn’t just about scaling a website or app to fit various devices. It’s about understanding how people use mobile devices and that the mobile experience is as unique as the user.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Christine Esoldo

Christine Esoldo

Christine is a UX/UI designer who specializes in data management, wellness products, and scaling UX teams for large organizations. She is the Director of UX and Product Design at CrowdStrike and has partnered with companies such as Dell, Lowe’s, and The Hershey Company.

Introduction to Deep Learning Trading in Hedge Funds

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Neven Pičuljan introduces you to the intricacies of deep learning in hedge funds and finance in general.

21 minute readContinue Reading
Neven Pičuljan

Neven Pičuljan

Co-founder of Poze and CEO of an AI R&D/consulting company, Neven has an MCS degree and has built a face-recognition system in TensorFlow.

E-commerce UX for the Mobile Experience

The explosive growth of e-commerce has created a need for online stores to adapt to mobile experiences. This post outlines the many aspects that make a successful mobile e-commerce experience.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Stelian Subotin

Stelian Subotin

Stelian is a UI designer with more than seven years of experience in designing and building projects of different scales from the ground up.

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