Toptal Blog

Over the past decade, venture capital funding has risen by 17% annually to a figure $254 billion. What factors have contributed to this surge and what do they mean for the industry going forward?

As people age, there are certain physiological and cognitive changes that are almost inevitable. Designers need to understand these changes to effectively master interface design for older adults.

Unit testing sometimes sounds like an unnecessary expense, but it is a powerful, yet simple tool. Unit tests allow you to identify and rectify weaknesses with relatively little effort. In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Nickolas Fisher takes you on a quick tour of unit testing and explains why you can’t have too many unit tests.

Design tools like Adobe XD can be used by designers to prototype multimodal designs that improve the user experience through interaction mechanisms such as voice, touch, and haptic feedback.

A functional specification is a high-level design document created before implementation and serves as a true plan for the team.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Ruby Developer Alec Ten Harmsel walks us through prototyping an algorithm and creating a functional specification with the help of AsciiDoc and R for a Ruby on Rails project.

Having the right look has always been important in finance. As dress codes are relaxing and the gamut of careers are expanding, what should one wear? From Allbirds to Patagucci, a style guide for financial services.

In Figma, UI Components are all-powerful and unbelievably versatile, but how do they work? We demonstrate their power by focusing on one of the most common UI elements of all—the button.

Miscommunication between product and tech teams is probably one of the biggest sources of resource waste in software development. The Technology Product Canvas helps product managers align their product roadmap with technical requirements and capabilities.

What do you do when you come across a dataset that’s simply too big to allow fast queries? Google BigQuery could be part of the solution, though it’s no silver bullet.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Maksym Goroshkevych explains how BigQuery can drastically improve query performance, and when you should and should not use it.