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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Designing GitHub’s Octoverse: A Data Visualization Case Study

Designer Gemma Busquets shares how she created a responsive website and 20+ engaging charts and graphs for the software development platform’s annual report.

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Gemma Busquets

Gemma is a designer and creative director with over 15 years of experience in UX, data visualization, and branding. She has taught data visualization for 7+ years at the university level and has directed a master’s degree program on the subject. Gemma’s portfolio includes collaborations with GitHub, Coca-Cola, Nike, Visa, and Seat.

Crucial Considerations for Aspiring Fintech UX Designers

Designing fintech products requires more than great UX/UI skills—you need to understand finance too. Here’s what designers need to know to get started.

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Gints Ziverts

Gints is a fintech product designer with deep financial expertise and a decade of experience designing websites, trading platforms, dashboards, and mobile apps for fintech companies, banks, forex, and crypto trading companies around the world.

What Is Agile? A Philosophy That Develops Through Practice

Agile’s flexibility is attractive, but its lack of specificity leads teams to misinterpret its applications. Agile expert Umar Ali explains how he helps teams prioritize values over practices.

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Umar Ali

Umar is a project manager, Agile coach, and Scrum master who specializes in leading Agile transformations for organizations and teams. He leverages Agile ways of working to improve software quality and push for process and cultural improvements that allow self-organizing teams—remote, on-site, and offshore—to flourish.

4 Bold Predictions About the Metaverse and Business

The so-called “future of the internet” isn’t here yet, but it’s coming soon. Here’s how to start preparing your company for impending metaverse growth.

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Laurence Brothers

Laurence is Toptal’s Senior Writer for Technology and Software. A former analyst at Google and ITA Software, and researcher at Bell Communications Research and Verizon Laboratories, he now writes about how AI, VR, cloud computing, and software impact business and the future of work. Laurence has five patents for AI and internet applications.

Optimize Your Environment for Development and Production: A Pydantic Tutorial, Part 2

Learn how to develop a Django application coupled with pydantic where the development environment matches production.

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Arjaan Buijk

Arjaan is a senior engineer and data scientist who creates mission-critical cloud solutions focused on Rasa for international banks and insurance companies. He architects and teaches large-scale Kubernetes solutions.

Own Your Health: The State of Connected Medical Devices

At-home medical monitoring is on the rise, thanks to the growing ranks of IoT devices and the promise of fewer doctor visits. How can designers ensure that at-home products meet patients’ needs?

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Lauren Song

Lauren is a UX designer with over nine years of experience helping businesses build compelling products. In 2015, her team received an International Design Excellence Award for the Interactive Surgical Manager, a dashboard software system that helps hospitals manage surgical supplies. Lauren has also created interaction guidelines for Samsung Electronics and provides augmented reality solutions for an internationally renowned construction tech company.

Tell a Compelling Story: Pitch Deck Components That Persuade

To persuade investors to fund your startup, your pitch deck must do more than present a solid business case. It must generate an emotional response.

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Brian Nichol

Brian is a seasoned management consultant who has held multiple corporate SVP roles and has been a consultant for startups seeking advice on fundraising and valuing their businesses. Having successfully raised seed capital for his own startup, he has a deep understanding of the commercial and operational aspects of starting a business.

Cybersecurity Spotlight: Preparing Your Organization for Deepfake Voice Clone Fraud

Neural networks have become expert manufacturers of the human voice, a skill that both content creators and cybercriminals love. Experts from the United Nations, Adobe, and speech synthesis pioneer Descript weigh in.

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Christopher Holloway

Christopher Holloway is Toptal’s Senior Writer for Technology. An award-winning journalist with more than a decade of experience investigating how technology transforms sectors like retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and banking, he has held editorial positions at highly reputed media companies in Latin America, including AmericaEconomia, La Tercera, and Netmedia.

Growth Product Management: What You Need to Know

Growth product managers are now a mainstay of Silicon Valley, but what do they do, how do they work, and what value do they bring? Find out in this guide to an increasingly vital product role.

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Philippe Araujo

As a growth product manager, Agile expert, and digital innovation consultant, Philippe helps clients, both startups and established companies, use data to deliver an improved user experience and increase product performance.