Toptal Blog

The foreign exchange (forex) market is the most liquid market in the world. Learn from a software developer’s firsthand experience creating forex algorithmic trading strategies—and more—in this trading tutorial.

Sometimes I hear people complaining about their clients, saying that they insist on using Rails, that they’ve had too much Kool Aid. If they are recruiters, they almost feel sick in the stomach from perspective of having to find yet another ROR primadona. From the programmers point of view it sometimes looks like clients don’t have a clue. However, I believe most clients know their options just fine and they still decide to go with Rails.

Sometimes, clients give us feature requests that we really don’t like. It’s not that we don’t like our clients, we love our clients. It’s not that we don’t like the feature, most client-requested features are aligned perfectly with their business goals and income. Sometimes, the reason we don’t like a feature request is that the easiest way to solve it is to write bad code, and we don’t have an Elegant Solution on the top of our heads. This will throw many of us on fruitless searches through RubyToolbox, github, developer blogs, and stackoverflow looking for a gem or plugin or example code that will make us feel better about ourselves.

Well, I’m here to tell you, it’s okay to write bad code. Sometimes, bad code is easier to refactor into beautiful code than a poorly thought out solution implemented under a time-crunch.

Node.js shines in real-time web apps that employ push technology over WebSocket. Node’s real-time, two-way connections—where the client and server can each initiate communication—enable the freer exchange of data.

It’s always fun to put your programming skills on display. A while back, I figured it’d be cool to try and control my laptop via my Android mobile device. Think about it: being able to play and pause music, start and stop programming jobs or downloads, etc., all by sending messages from your phone. Neat, huh?

Female engineers are valuable at Toptal. This is a piece about how we stand up for their rights and value them for their skills and talent.

After much thought, I decided to engineer a solution to the idea abandonment problem. I call it the ‘Init’ project (or Init.js).

The core of the idea is to have a single project to start them all, to let the developer or the technical founder make all of the essential decisions at once, and receive an appropriate starting template based on those decisions.

Demand within the web design scene today has changed over the past few years: designers with front-end skills, and front-end developers with design skills, are more and more in demand. Yes, you could argue that the jobs are completely different—and maybe you straight-up don’t like one of them—but truth be told, in my six years as a freelance web developer and twelve years as a designer, I’ve learned that it’s much harder to get by as just a web designer or just a front-end developer.

Wearing both hats has a lot of advantages: from a professional perspective alone, you can find work more easily and charge a higher rate because you’re bringing more to the table.

But this isn’t just another article about cohort analysis. If you already know the importance of the topic and want to skip the introduction, you can jump to the simulator, where you can either simulate startup growth based on retention, churn, and a number of other factors, or analyze your own PayPal logs with the code I’ve open sourced.

If, however, you don’t realize that these are some of the most important metrics around–continue reading.