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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How to Conduct User Research as a Team of One

User research is essential to product design, but it can be challenging to do alone. Explore how a solo designer can optimize time and resources to uncover important user insights.

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Anna Vasyukova

Anna is a data-driven product designer who specializes in user research, analytics, and usability testing. She holds an MBA, a Certificate in User Experience Design from the Nielsen Norman Group, and a Professional Diploma in UX Design from UX Design Institute.

Understanding Twitter Dynamics With R and Gephi: Text Analysis and Centrality

Centrality and text analysis allow users to get more out of their social network data. Here’s how you can leverage them using R and Gephi.

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Juan Manuel Ortiz de Zarate

Juan is a developer, data scientist, and doctoral researcher at the University of Buenos Aires where he studies social networks, AI, and NLP. Juan has more than a decade of data science experience and has published papers at ML conferences, including SPIRE and ICCS.

Streamline Your Django Settings With Type Hints: A Pydantic Tutorial, Part 1

Python and pydantic make a powerful runtime combination when validating data and settings, resulting in reduced debugging and a simplified code base.

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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.

Navigating the Next Normal: Fortune 500 Executives on the Future of Talent

Top HR leaders at Walmart, Xerox, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Synchrony tell Toptal about the innovative steps they’re taking to attract, nurture, and grow top talent.

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Sunny Gold

Sunny is the Lead Editor for Toptal Insights, where she covers business, tech, healthcare, leadership, and the future of work. A veteran journalist, Sunny has held editorial positions at some of the largest and most well-known media companies in the US, including Condé Nast, Hearst, and Bonnier.

PageSpeed Insights Best Practices: Acing Google’s Assessment

Page speed is an important ranking attribute for search engines, making performance optimization a prerequisite for successful sites. Here’s how Google PageSpeed Insights can help identify and rectify performance issues.

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Timofey Bugaevsky

Timofey is a CTO and veteran full-stack engineer with over 18 years of experience developing new products and sustaining existing ones. He holds an Engineer’s Degree in Robotics and an MBA.

Bots for Finance: How to Increase Back-office Efficiency Through Automation

Automating basic financial functions can save your company time and money and free your employees from tedious rote tasks. Toptal management consultant Miklos Lukacs explains how building a simple Python bot can streamline your business.

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Miklos Lukacs, CFA

Miklos is highly experienced in finance processes, fintech, and Python programming. In addition to being a Toptal management consultant and software developer, he is the director of the structured finance consulting company Pylink Ltd.

A Day in the Life of an Engineering Manager

Engineering managers tend to have a wide range of responsibilities. In this article, Karl Hughes, founder of Draft.dev, shares what a typical day in the life of an engineering manager looks like.

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Karl Hughes

Karl is a former software engineering manager and CTO turned writer. He’s currently the founder of Draft.dev.

Is the Citizen Developer the New Face of Agility?

In an era of talent shortages and fast delivery, the low-code market is taking off. Citizen development on a low-code platform may be the solution your organization needs.

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Bryan Bates

Bryan has more than 20 years of experience managing projects in Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid environments. He holds a PMP certification and the Microsoft Power Platform Functional Consultant credential. Bryan uses his low-code expertise to assist new users in the Microsoft Power Apps Community forum.

Working With TypeScript and Jest Support: An AWS SAM Tutorial

JavaScript boilerplate is easy enough to come by, but there’s a bit more to starting AWS SAM projects with TypeScript. Here’s how to create an AWS SAM TypeScript project from scratch with Jest support.

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Mohammad Faisal

Mohammad is a full-stack developer who has architected several applications on AWS using Lambda, NoSQL, and Node.js. He has extensive experience in optimizing AWS infrastructure for midsized companies.