Toptal Blog

Persuasive design isn’t evil. It’s a tool, and like any tool, it can be misused. However, with the right research and thoughtful application, it can be a valuable addition to any designer’s toolkit.

Four years on from the signing of the JOBS act, equity crowdfunding remains a small, niche market. In this article, we take a look at the current state of equity crowdfunding in the US and assess some of the challenges the market faces if it wants to grow into its potential.

PhalconPHP will make your high-load application fast and easy, it’s one of the fastest MVC frameworks for PHP available. It’s written in C and supplied as a compiled PHP extension, so it doesn’t need to be interpreted at every request. Consider PhalconPHP for your next project, you won’t regret it.

Startups nowadays are hyper focused on growth at all costs, a practice which often undermines the fundamental health of the business. This article takes an in-depth look at the importance of focusing on customer retention from day one and the practical benefits it can provide in the medium to long term.

Deploying new features with Salesforce can be problematic in more ways than one. It is crucial to have a sound strategy governing the publication of new releases, without running the risk of breaking your product.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Ajinkya Deshmukh will provide you with all relevant information and key tips that will allow you to manage your next Salesforce release smoothly.

With tax reform discussions likely to rise to the national forefront, this article provides analysis regarding border adjustment taxes and the recent House proposal. It assesses economic implications and historical comparisons to help you understand how you and your business might be impacted.

Magento built a reputation as an e-commerce market leader, all thanks to its ease of use and customizability. Getting into the framework was only made easier with the release of Magento 2.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Gabriel Queiroz Silva gives us a step-by-step tutorial to building your first Magento 2 website.

Fat controllers and models: an inevitable problem for most large-scale projects based on MVC frameworks such as Yii and Laravel. Fortunately, there’s a cure, and it’s in architecting a layered structure.

With the arrival and growing ubiquity of big data, Excel, as a data-mining and processing tool has been pushed to its limits—reflected in its dated 1,048,576 row hard limit and the application’s processing speed slowing to a crawl. As of 2010, Microsoft released a Power Pivot function that transformed the scope and usefulness of Excel where the extraction, combination, and analysis of large datasets are concerned.

Using live cases, Management Consultant Ellen Su explores in detail how to master Power Pivot and explores its hidden advantages as a big data tool.