Toptal Blog

At Toptal, we’re always looking for the best freelancers around. But what makes a freelancer truly great? Luis Martinho, one of our top developers, is beloved by his clients — so we sat down with him to talk about freelancing, technologies, and paying your taxes.

Starting a new remote gig, be it a contract project or a full-time job, can be a little intimidating if you're used to going into an office day after day. But this style of employment is growing in popularity, with some very notable companies lending it their endorsements. I've worked remotely for years now on projects of various scales and durations. With this post, I hope to enumerate some of the best practices that I've picked up for working in a variety of situations. The advice here ranges from specific recommendations for software and hardware to tips for hitting your team's deadlines.

Clouds must be efficient to provide useful fault-tolerance and scalability, but they also must be easy to use. CloudI (pronounced "cloud-e" /klaʊdi/) is an open source cloud computing platform that is most closely related to the Platform as a Service (PaaS) clouds. CloudI differs in a few key ways, most importantly: software developers are not forced to use specific frameworks, slow hardware virtualization, or a particular operating system. By allowing cloud deployment to occur without virtualization, CloudI leaves development process and runtime performance unimpeded, while quality of service can be controlled with clear accountability.

I live in Córdoba, Argentina, approximately 130 kilometers (~80 miles) away from the lake where I kitesurf. Thats roughly a two-hour drive, which I can deal with. But I can't deal with the fact that weather forecasts are inaccurate. And where I live, good wind conditions last just a couple of hours. The last thing you want to do is clear up your Monday schedule to go kitesurfing and find yourself cursing the gods on a windless lake after two hours of driving. I needed to know the wind conditions of my favorite kitesurfing spot—in real time. So I decided to build my own weather station.

Everyone has their own set of tools. As a PHP developer, one of my favorites is a Rapid Application Development framework called “Nooku”. In the words of the development group: “Nooku is more of a web development toolkit than a framework” In case you are not familiar with it, have a look. It’s an open source project that makes heavy use of industry accepted design patterns to produce highly componentized applications that are easily extensible and reusable (initially created by one of the lead Joomla developers). Out of the box, Nooku gives you a great deal to help get projects off the ground faster. A small, but strong sample:

Porn is a big industry. There aren’t many sites on the Internet that can rival the traffic of its biggest players. And juggling this immense traffic is tough. To make things even harder, much of the content served from porn sites is made up of low latency live streams rather than simple static video content. But for all of the challenges involved, rarely have I read about the developers who take them on. So I decided to write about my own experience on the job.

Some of the world’s biggest companies are adopting remote work policies. Here’s how 10 of them stack up.

My small business providing criminal background checks was cruising along in 2007. We weren’t the biggest provider, but our reputation and sales had grown enough in the six years since our inception to let us compete in local and national markets.

The COVID-19 tragedy demonstrates our exposure to rare, high-impact events and offers lessons for the next disruptive occurrences. Standard business practices exacerbate these events—here’s how businesses can position themselves for positive, seamless responses in the future.