Toptal Blog

How can designers move beyond personal insights to understand the problems users face? We introduce time-tested UX research methods that inspire user empathy and lead to better user experiences.

The whole point of smart contracts is that they need to be more secure and efficient than traditional contracts. So where do smart contract oracles fit in?

In the final installment of our three-part series, Toptal Blockchain Developer John R. Kosinski explains the role of oracles in the evolution of trust.

A vital part of creating an optimal user experience, visual hierarchy determines the order in which people take in and process information on a page, regardless of whether it’s digital or print.

Social responsibility is increasingly front-of-mind for employees as they consider where to build their careers. This article explores how skills-based volunteering can not only serve as a strong employee retention strategy in response to this greater desire for social impact, but also democratize highly skilled talent to help a broader range organizations and communities.

We often hear about business plans in the context of early-stage companies; however, constructing excellent business plans is difficult and time-consuming, so many entrepreneurs avoid them. But, is this a mistake?

While most people may be aware of the “soft” arguments for and against writing a business plan, in this article, a Toptal Finance Expert takes a data-driven approach to addressing the debate. In it, he finds strong evidence to support the notion that writing an excellent business plan is time well spent.

ClojureScript is the tool of choice for front-end developers who have tried it. Recently in this series, we showed how to use it to get started with React. In today’s tutorial, Toptal Freelance Clojure Developer Luke Tomlin dives into how to use Redux for React state management in ClojureScript.

Real-time data-driven apps create new challenges in the way we structure our programs, especially on mobile. In this article, Toptal Freelance iOS Developer Lucas van Dongen implements an iOS chat app, comparing the classic MVC approach with a static immutable MVVM pattern.

Sound can be easily overlooked in UX design, but it’s an essential element in building impactful user interactions, such as providing feedback for user’s actions and building brand recognition.

Writing an application is only part of the story. In order for it to be of value, it needs deploying somewhere it can scale; it has to run with high availability, have backups, and so on. Deployment and infrastructure management isn’t a simple process. And Terraform does nothing to hide the complexity. However, it does make your infrastructure declarative and reproducible, like your code.

In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Radosław Szalski teaches us what Terraform is, how its components work, and how to configure an entire AWS Cloud solution in minutes using its configuration language.