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

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

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Fintech Valuation Methods for Money Transfer Disruptors

Valuation of private fintech startups is a step-by-step process that requires a holistic assessment of macro industrial factors and micro assumptions about the startup’s future prospects. Learn how to value fintech companies in a practical step-by-step manner with this working example for payments unicorn Transferwise.

14 minute readContinue Reading
Nirvikar Jain

Nirvikar Jain

Nirvikar has helped raise $20+ billion of capital and built lines of business as an experienced CEO, banker, and strategist.

Ensuring Clean Code: A Look at Python, Parameterized

We’ll explore the application of parameterization and how it relates to mainstream design patterns such as dependency injection, strategy, template method, and others. In Python, many of these are made unnecessary by the fact that parameters can be callable objects or classes.

12 minute readContinue Reading
Luke Plant

Luke Plant

A Django core developer since 2006, Luke is a full-stack developer primarily using Python focused on server-side technologies.

A Complete Overview of the Best Data Visualization Tools

When dealing with data sets that include hundreds of thousands or millions of data points, automating the process of data visualization makes a designer’s job significantly easier.

12 minute readContinue Reading
Cameron Chapman

Cameron Chapman

Cameron comes from a design background and is the author of two web design books: Color for Web Design and The Smashing Idea Book.

Industry Analysis and Porter’s Five Forces: A Deeper Look at Buyer Power

In this article, Toptal Finance Expert Jacob Decter unpacks the concept of buyer power, one of the Five Forces that Michael Porter popularized in his now famous framework, providing useful insights and tips to businesses looking to stay ahead of the game and thrive.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Jacob Decter

Jacob Decter

A Wall Street-trained former Fortune 500 M&A and strategy VP, Jacob has led over $2 billion in acquisitions and divestitures.

Project Management Tools Comparison: Jira vs. Trello vs. MS Project vs. Basecamp vs. Asana vs. Wrike

Project management software comparison websites list about 600 different project management tools and choosing the right one can be head-spinning. We provide a list of 6 essential PM tools and insights on which types of projects they are most suited for.

13 minute readContinue Reading
Vytas Butkus

Vytas Butkus

Vytas is a professional project and product manager leading products and projects in education, 3D graphics, eCommerce, and adtech.

A Better Approach to Google Cloud Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment is the practice of automatically deploying new code to production. Most continuous deployment systems validate that the code to be deployed with tests, and then build and deploy if everything looks good. However, there’s a better way.

In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Antoine Reversat builds an event-driven continuous deployment pipeline that builds first and then runs tests on our final deployment artifact before deploying. This makes test results more reliable, and the CD pipeline easily extendable.

9 minute readContinue Reading
Antoine Reversat

Antoine Reversat

Antoine has worked for Facebook, Ubisoft, and more as a Linux systems administrator and Python developer over 14 years.

What Makes for a Successful Management Buyout Process?

Buying out the business you work for and then running it yourself doesn’t have to be a pipe dream. Management buyouts (MBOs) have been popular since the 1980s and when aligned correctly are appealing propositions for owners and motivated management teams.

15 minute readContinue Reading
Tyler Cain

Tyler Cain

Tyler has led private and public investment activity across industries, including consumer and healthcare, among others.

E-commerce UX: An Overview of Best Practices (with Infographic)

74% of businesses believe that UX is important for improving sales, yet billions are lost due to shopping cart and checkout abandonment—when it comes to e-commerce UX, shoppers still tend to be considered last.

< 5 minute readContinue Reading
Miklos Philips

Miklos Philips

Miklos is a lead UX designer and strategist with more than 18 years of experience in a wide variety of projects across multiple industries.

Five Battle-tested Techniques Your WordPress API Developer Isn't Using

One of the best ways to elevate your status as a WordPress developer, at least in the eyes of your clients, is to become skilled at writing API consumers.

In this article, Toptal Freelance WordPress Developer Scott Fennell guides you through five techniques that will help you create powerful WordPress API clients to perfectly suit your needs.

13 minute readContinue Reading
Scott Fennell

Scott Fennell

Scott has written hundreds of WordPress themes and plugins. He specializes in third-party API integration and he’s an active tech writer.

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