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.

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

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The Value of User Testing With Prototypes

User testing, often confused with usability testing, is an overarching term to describe testing which helps validate the need for a product. When used with prototypes and the right testing tools, it can help save a product from failure.

6-minute readContinue Reading
Gabriel Kirmaier

Gabriel Kirmaier

Gabriel is a UX/UI designer who creates data-driven solutions for web and mobile platforms. He has worked with companies such as Stripe and Goodleap, and his book UX Bites was named “Best New Release” in the design category on Amazon.

How to Build a React Native QR Scanner: An RNCamera Tutorial

Cross-platform mobile apps are increasingly being built with React Native. But how can you scan for QR codes and augment the user’s camera view when they’re present?

6-minute readContinue Reading
Bassam Seif

Bassam Seif

Having founded multiple startups and worked with Microsoft, Bassam specializes in highly scalable, full-stack JavaScript applications.

Dial 996 for Fatigue: How to Prioritize Avoiding Burnout

There’s nothing heroic about overwhelm. In a world where competition is fiercer than ever, the best of the best will win by protecting their ability to perform and deliver peak results, and that means avoiding burnout. This three-part framework can decrease stress while increasing productivity, creativity, and free time.

10-minute readContinue Reading
Ethan Brooks

Ethan Brooks

Ethan Brooks is the North American Community Lead at Toptal. He works alongside the rest of the Community Team, and members of Toptal’s global network, to help foster growth in North America and deliver outstanding value to Toptalers around the world.

Using Spring Boot for WebSocket Implementation with STOMP

The WebSocket protocol is one of the ways to make your application handle real-time messages. The most common alternatives are long polling and server-sent events. This article shows how to implement WebSockets with the Spring Boot framework and use STOMP for effective client-server communication.

9-minute readContinue Reading
Tomasz Dąbrowski

Tomasz Dąbrowski

Tomasz has more than 20 years of experience with Java apps, and worked for companies like Hewlett-Packard, as well as Silicon Valley startups.

The Comprehensive List of Product Management Conferences

The only product management conference list you will ever need. It is arranged by month and includes information on location and ticket prices.

9-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.

Design’s Driving Forces: A Website Redesign Case Study

When is the most appropriate time to do a website redesign? This case study walks us through a website redesign for a high-end auto company and outlines key issues along the way.

9-minute readContinue Reading
Goran Ramljak

Goran Ramljak

Goran is a visual and interaction designer with several years of experience working at some of the best marketing agencies in Europe.

Laravel Zero Downtime Deployment

Updating live applications used to be a tedious and somewhat risky affair, but with the emergence of modern development frameworks and tools, updates and deployment are becoming straightforward.

In this article, Toptal Java Developer Elene Latsoshvili explains how you can update a Laravel app with zero downtime, and how this can be done for most PHP applications.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Elene Latsoshvili

Elene Latsoshvili

Elene is a full-stack developer with 12+ years of experience. She’s language/stack agnostic, but her primary fields are Java and JavaScript.

History of Augmented Reality: Glow Pucks to Immersive Reality

Andrew Graunke, Toptal Head of Enterprise Design, has implemented augmented reality (AR) design projects for dozens of enterprises. Here he outlines his pocket history of AR: from fighter jets to touchless computers to Glow Pucks, AR has already started making waves. Based on his current projects and pipeline, Graunke also blueprints his vision for AR’s future.

8-minute readContinue Reading
Andrew Graunke

Andrew Graunke

As Director of Enterprise Design at Toptal, Andrew helps CEOs and FORTUNE 500 innovation teams scale easy-to-use, technology-sound, high-impact products. Andrew’s work has been featured in Wired, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review.

7 Debugging Techniques To Speed Up Troubleshooting in Production

Providing production support to an application is one of the most challenging aspects of software development. In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Flavio Pezzini shows us techniques that can prevent bugs and make finding issues in production much faster.

6-minute readContinue Reading
Flavio Pezzini

Flavio Pezzini

Flavio has worked on complex projects for several multinational, multicultural companies such as Dell, IBM, and Deutsche Bank.

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