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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Empty States: The Most Overlooked Aspect of UX

Empty states are often overlooked in UX design, but they can be drivers of substantial business benefits, and if done right, contribute to a more compelling user experience.

9-minute readContinue Reading
Shane Ketterman

Shane Ketterman

Shane comes from a background in architecture and design, information technology, and content marketing, and has a passion for UX research.

What Does A CFO Do? The Evolving Role and Responsibilities

Over the last few decades, the CFO role has changed profoundly. Beyond overseeing traditional finance functions, the modern CFO now partners with the CEO to drive organizational decision-making and strategy.

6-minute readContinue Reading
Paul Ainsworth

Paul Ainsworth

Paul is an international CFO with experience at large multinationals. After taking on roles of increasing responsibility at General Electric and Orica, he now draws on his operational finance and transformation experience to consult at a variety of companies.

The Enterprise Starting Point: Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

An expanding array of artificial technology options presents enterprise executives with a daunting challenge: where to start? Toptal executives share perspective on the distinction between AI and Data Science, and why the latter serves as the best starting point for most companies.

7-minute readContinue Reading
Toptal Research

Toptal Research

In-depth analysis and industry-leading thought leadership from a panel of Toptal researchers and subject matter experts.

How to Make a Discord Bot: an Overview and Tutorial

Discord is a popular real-time messaging platform with robust support for programmable bots. Bots are ubiquitous on Discord and provide a wide range of services, including moderation assistance, games, music, internet searches, payment processing, and more.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer and Chatbot Developer Randall Schmidt discusses the Discord UI and APIs for bots and presents a Discord bot tutorial. ImBursting, the developer of Rythm—one of Discord’s most popular bots—shares his experiences on developing and maintaining his significant infrastructure and codebase.

26-minute readContinue Reading
Randall Schmidt

Randall Schmidt

Randall has more than eight years of development experience working across various domains and languages and is known for his attention to detail.

Valuation Drivers to Consider During the M&A Sale Process

While selling one’s company can seem like a daunting and difficult task, there exists a proven model and framework that drives valuation to maximum levels and leads to deals successfully getting done. This post is a guide for those contemplating a sale, as to what are the primary and secondary valuation drivers in a sale and how the process is conducted.

11-minute readContinue Reading
Jonathan Wesner, CFA

Jonathan Wesner, CFA

Jonathan has more than eight years of experience in M&A, successfully completing 35 investment banking transactions totaling $940 million.

Simplicity Is Key: Exploring Minimal Web Design

Designers who approach minimalist UI design as being easy are often surprised at the amount of effort, time, and skill required to create a product that can achieve its aims while remaining truly minimalist.

9-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.

The Project Management Blueprint, Part 2: A Comprehensive Comparison of Waterfall, DAD, SAFe, LeSS, and Scrum@Scale

Agile has become the mainstream approach to software delivery recently due to the popularity of Scrum and Kanban. However, many problems arise when project managers try to scale traditional agile frameworks to larger groups of people. A lot of companies revert to waterfall framework while others use hybrid methodologies like DAD, SAFe, LeSS, or Scrum@Scale.

17-minute readContinue Reading
Darren Hagman

Darren Hagman

Darren is a veteran developer, scrum master, and project manager with deep experience in both waterfall and agile methodologies.

Color Theory for Designers: A Crash Course (With Infographic)

Color: It’s stunningly beautiful and maddeningly deceptive. Use this color theory field guide (with an infographic) to make lightning-quick color choices with unwavering confidence.

< 5-minute readContinue Reading
Micah Bowers

Micah Bowers

Micah helps businesses craft meaningful engagement through branding, illustration, and design.

Architecting Optimization Algorithms with HorusLP

HorusLP is a new Python tool designed to help with the architecture of algorithm development workflows. It provides an architectural framework for the development of optimization algorithms.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun Wang explains how HorusLP came to be and demonstrates its capabilities with a few example algorithms.

22-minute readContinue Reading
Shanglun Wang

Shanglun Wang

Sean is a passionate polyglot: A full-stack wizard, sys admin, and data scientist. He’s also developed market intelligence software.

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