Toptal Blog

When productivity wanes, the most effective solution is to get motivated. However, this is easier said than done. Motives might be deep-rooted, but once uncovered, they can trigger productive behavior. Neuroscientific research links motivation to self-sustaining productivity.

Many brands overshoot the subtleties of virtue signaling. They preach, posture, and alienate the people they’re trying to impress. We explore how companies can bang their virtue drums better.

More than half of IT projects and products fail. The biggest causes of these failures are resource misallocation and misalignment with business goals. Expertly crafted product business cases can help to mitigate both of these problems.

SQL window functions are calculation functions similar to aggregate functions but, unlike normal aggregate functions like “group by,” have access to individual rows and can even add some of their attributes into the result set.

In this article, Toptal Freelance SQL Developer Neal Barnett explains the benefits of SQL functions, describes when you’d use them, and gives you real examples to help with the concepts.

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.