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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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Has the US Equity Crowdfunding Market Lived up to Expectations?

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.

14 minute readContinue Reading
Toby Clarence-Smith

Toby Clarence-Smith

Toby has deep financial experience across investment banking, VC investing, and PE. He most recently founded and sold a VC-backed company.

PhalconPHP: A Solution for High-load RESTful APIs

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.

20 minute readContinue Reading
Andrew Belousoff

Andrew Belousoff

Andrew (MCS) has done both desktop and full-stack development since 2010, focusing on PHP, JS, CSS, and C++, plus databases and CMSes.

The Importance of Customer Retention: An Empirical Study

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.

14 minute readContinue Reading
Josh Chapman

Josh Chapman

After covering tech IPOs on Wall Street, Josh brought this experience to the other side of the table and founded two companies of his own.

The Salesforce Release Train: A Practical Approach to Release Management

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.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Ajinkya Deshmukh

Ajinkya Deshmukh

Ajinkya is a senior Salesforce developer and architect. He is skilled at advanced Apex programming, Visualforce, and Lightning development.

What is the Border Adjustment Tax? Potential Benefits and Risks

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.

11 minute readContinue Reading
Melissa Lin

Melissa Lin

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

Magento 2 Tutorial: How to Build a Complete Module

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.

25+ minute readContinue Reading
Gabriel Queiroz Silva

Gabriel Queiroz Silva

Gabriel is a certified Magento developer who writes clean code and follows best practices, and he is also an experienced PHP developer.

Maintain Slim PHP MVC Frameworks with a Layered Structure

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.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Elvira Sheina

Elvira Sheina

Elvira is a senior software engineer with nearly 15 years of experience in full-stack web development and automation.

Power Pivot for Excel Tutorial: Top Use Cases and Examples

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, Finance Expert Ellen Su explores in detail how to master Power Pivot and explores its hidden advantages as a big data tool.

17 minute readContinue Reading
Ellen Su

Ellen Su

Ellen’s extensive experience in fixed income trading and portfolio management make her an unparalleled expert in analytics and modeling.

How to Conduct Usability Testing in Six Steps

User testing is easy and inexpensive and will substantially improve product designs. Insights from observing how people use a digital product are well worth it, as outlined in this six-step process.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Jan Roose

Jan Roose

John is a dedicated product designer who specializes in UX and AI. He pushes ideas to greatness with both large corporations and startups.

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