Toptal Blog

The Toptal Blog is the top hub for developers, designers, management consultants, executives, and entrepreneurs, featuring key technology updates, tutorials, freelancer resources, and management insights.

Toptal core team members share their experience, expertise, and perspectives on the Toptal Edge Blog

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Agile Scaling: SAFe Best Practices for Scrum Masters

This article is part of Toptal’s Agile scaling series, designed to guide project managers in their team expansion efforts. In this second installment, Toptal Scrum expert Ammar Raafat discusses how Scrum masters moving into the role of release train engineer can help their teams thrive.

11-minute readContinue Reading

Ammar Raafat Mohamed Bashandy

Ammar is a SAFe release train engineer and Agile program manager at Vodafone Group, where he leads a multidisciplinary agile release train team of 43 engineers, designers, and product managers. He holds 10 current project management certifications—including Advanced Scrum Master, Scrum Product Owner, and SAFe Agilist—and has an MBA from ESLSCA Business School Paris.

5 Agile Scaling Frameworks Compared: Which One Should You Use?

Toptal’s Agile scaling series is designed to guide project managers in their team expansion efforts. In this first installment, project manager Kamil Imański breaks down popular scaling frameworks to help you make the best choice.

9-minute readContinue Reading

Kamil Imański

Kamil is an Agile project manager and Scrum master with a background in business analysis and change management. He has extensive experience leading teams and implementing Agile scaling practices at international companies, including BAE Systems, which is an FTSE100 company and the largest defense contractor in Europe. He is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, PMP, and PMI-ACP.

Sharpen Your Skills With Fun Online Games for Designers

Online design games are perfect for practicing tricky tools and techniques, boosting core UI/UX skills, and keeping pace with a rapidly evolving industry.

10-minute readContinue Reading

Susanne Aubert

Susanne is a product designer specializing in lean UX, interactive media, and front-end development. She has extensive experience working with clients in AI, aviation, and healthcare and serves as a product design consultant for Lantum, a workforce management platform used by the National Health Service.

.NET on Linux: Simpler Than It Seems

Discover Microsoft .NET’s cross-platform development capabilities by building a Dockerized ASP.NET and Entity Framework application on Linux.

8-minute readContinue Reading

Zablon Dawit

Zablon is a full-stack web developer specializing in ASP.NET and JavaScript. He has created enterprise software for various companies, including Pelmorex Corp and S.R.E Software Development.

Name Your Price: 4 Counterintuitive Pricing Strategy Tips

High inflation means it’s crucial for managers to pay closer attention to pricing. Toptal management consultant Kalil Rodrigues shares four outside-the-box tips for optimizing your pricing strategy.

10-minute readContinue Reading

Kalil Gebrim Rodrigues

Kalil is a corporate strategist, management consultant, and business consultant. An alum of Bain & Company and global aerospace firm Embraer, he has also led strategic initiatives at Nubank, a Latin American fintech leader with more than 50 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Kalil is an expert in pricing models, revenue and expense projections, forecasting, financial modeling, and mergers and acquisitions.

Kinder Tools: How to Improve Enterprise UX Design for Mental Health

Enterprise tools can be fraught with features and interactions that exacerbate mental health disorders. These UX solutions improve accessibility and help everyone have a better workday.

10-minute readContinue Reading

Danae Botha

Danae has over 15 years of user-focused design experience, producing digital products for international clients such as Subway restaurants and the Cambridge Dictionary. She specializes in blending user research, prototyping, and development with business strategy to create elegant, effective products.

The 10 Most Common JavaScript Issues Developers Face

At first, JavaScript may seem quite simple. Yet the language is significantly more nuanced, powerful, and complex than one would initially be led to believe. Many of JavaScript’s subtleties lead to a number of common problems—10 of which we discuss here—that keep code from behaving as intended. It’s important to be aware of and avoid these pitfalls in one’s quest to become a master JavaScript developer.

13-minute readContinue Reading

Ryan J. Peterson

Ryan is an architect, entrepreneur, and developer. He is skilled in building cloud-scalable, extensible software systems.

Unity AI Development: An xNode-based Graphical FSM Tutorial

Take your Unity AI game to the next level with xNode. In this tutorial, we boost our FSM-based AI with a graphical user interface, delivering an enhanced development environment.

13-minute readContinue Reading

Garegin Tadevosyan

Garegin is an accomplished Unity and C# game developer. He created a networking protocol for gamified playground equipment, served as the CTO of an educational gaming startup, and was a game developer on a multinational social-casino team.

For Your Health: 5 Tips and Strategies for Wellness Branding

The health and wellness industry is booming, creating opportunity—and a competitive market. Wellness businesses can apply these branding best practices to stand out and connect with customers.

10-minute readContinue Reading

Pilar Rios Niño

Pilar is a UX/UI designer and illustrator with deep expertise building brand design and strategy for yoga, health food, and fitness companies. She holds a postgraduate degree in UX/UI design and bachelor’s degrees in fine arts and advertising and public relations.