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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Building the Next Big Thing: A Guide to Business Idea Development

Business idea development for new venture concepts is a mixture of art and science. There are playbooks to follow that ensure ideas are validated objectively to ensure financial and opportunity cost risks are minimized.

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Brendan Fitzgerald

Brendan has raised more than $700 million and built strategic relationships with numerous Fortune 500 companies to help grow businesses.

Launching a Spring Boot Application Programmatically

Starting a Spring Boot application in the command line is as simple as it gets. But what if we want to run our application from another Java program?

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Igor Delac demonstrates how you can start a Spring Boot app programmatically using just a few lines of code.

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Igor Delac

Igor is an enthusiastic and skilled professional with extensive experience in Java development, system administration, and more.

How to Prevent Feature Creep With User Story Best Practices

Designers should not rely on user stories alone to prevent feature creep. However, working with them provides the critical measurements designers need to deliver products with great user experiences.

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Florence Dairo

Florence is a digital product designer and strategist. She has worked with startups to create seamless and delightful experiences.

Serializing Complex Objects in JavaScript

The Tanagra.js library is designed to be simple and lightweight, and it currently supports Node.js and ES6 classes. The main implementation supports JSON, and an experimental version supports Google Protocol Buffers.

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Luke Wilson

Luke has 12 years of experience as an engineer, team lead, and scrum master.

Starting an App Business the Right Way

Building an app-based business can be a daunting project: Within such a competitive space, how can you make your app stand out, attract and retain the right audience, and then monetize it?

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Natasha Ketabchi

Natasha transitioned to venture capital after a career in banking built in prestigious firms such as JPMorgan and ESM.

Optimizing Retailer Revenue With Sales Forecasting AI

Retailers often face supply and demand issues that cause them to miss out on potential sales or tie up a lot of money in overstocked products.

In this article, Toptal Data Scientist Ahmed Khaled explains how retailers can boost revenues and cut costs with sales forecasts backed by artificial intelligence.

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Ahmed Khaled

Ahmed is a senior data scientist who solves clients’ problems using state-of-the-art, data-driven solutions. With expertise in NLP, Python, machine learning, and data visualization, he designs, implements, and deploys end-to-end data science solutions to optimize outcomes, automate processes, and enhance decision-making. He has worked with both small and large-scale businesses across multiple industries including healthcare and construction.

K8s/Kubernetes: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

Kubernetes (“K8s”) won the battle of container orchestration tools. Now AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each offer a managed Kubernetes version. How do they compare?

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Guillaume Dury

Guillaume is a DevOps engineer who specializes in improving automation to help engineers deliver faster. He mastered Docker and Kubernetes while working for startups in Hong Kong, then launched his own cloud consulting company, and now serves as a senior site reliability engineering manager at Cisco’s Duo Security.

Safe and Sound: How to Approach Password UX

For too long, the user experience of password management has been ignored, leading to serious losses for businesses and users alike. It’s time for designers to rethink every aspect of password UX.

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Mayank Sharma

Mayank specializes in creating user-centered designs and translating complex systems into beautiful web and mobile experiences.

Quality of Earnings: A Key Pillar of Financial Due Diligence

Financial due diligence is the process of making sure the price of an asset is in line with its operating performance “under the hood.” Assessing the quality of earnings is one of its key tests: How sustainable is the business’ reported financial performance?

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