Toptal Blog
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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The Principles of Design and Their Importance
Good design is possible without understanding the principles of design. But it may take a lot of trial and error to create something that both looks good and creates an optimal user experience. 🔊
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.
F# Tutorial: How to Build a Full-stack F# App
F# is a strongly typed, multi-paradigm programming language with imperative, functional, and object-oriented programming methods.
In the first part of our F# tutorial series, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun Wang demonstrates how to get started and create a simple app using nothing but F#.
Shanglun Wang
Sean is a passionate polyglot: A full-stack wizard, sys admin, and data scientist. He’s also developed market intelligence software.
A Complete Guide on How to Seamlessly Take Over an Existing Project
As project managers, we are sometimes tasked with taking over a project in progress. In this guide, we will outline how to plan a project takeover and execute it flawlessly. Use the included project manager checklist for your upcoming projects.
Luciano Castro
Luciano is a business-driven manager with over 15 years of experience as a CTO and CEO in multinational companies and startups.
How to Get Consulting Clients – An Interview with Steve Blank
Consultants often struggle to find new, solid clients. We asked Steve Blank, the founder of the Lean Startup movement (and someone who has helped hundreds of companies get a better product to market faster and worked with dozens of consultants along the way) how consultants can attract clients.
Steve’s advice is a bit counter-intuitive. But it’s something that Toptal’s best consultants have already been doing for years.
Elizabeth J. Howell Hanano, CFA
Elizabeth began her career as an equity analyst and brings a deep understanding of how to unlock value within companies, big and small.
Adapting for Success – A Guide to Change Management
With today’s rapid pace of technological progress, organizational change is perhaps more necessary than it ever has been. But change is hard. Countless studies show that more often than not, corporations fail to implement change successfully, losing money, time, and employee morale in the process.
Based on his 20+ years of international finance experience across a range of industries, and over a decade of experience as a CFO, Toptal Finance Expert Edwin Petersen outlines his thoughts on why change management often fails and how to get it right.
Edwin Petersen
Edwin has 20+ years of international finance experience across a range of industries, and over a decade of experience as a CFO.
Better Android Apps Using MVVM With Clean Architecture
Keeping your Android codebase maintainable as your codebase grows can be a challenge. In this article, Toptal Freelance Android Developer Abhishek Tyagi shows how to combine MVVM with Clean Architecture—the latter as described by Robert C. Martin—to write decoupled, testable, and maintainable code.
Abhishek Tyagi
A team lead and Android entrepreneur with 5+ years of experience, Abhishek has contributed to apps with more than 5 million downloads.
The Best UX Designer Portfolios: Inspiring Case Studies and Examples
What makes a winning UX portfolio? More than a showcase of skills, a UX designer’s portfolio is an opportunity for them to create an enjoyable user experience as well as demonstrate their UX mastery.
Miklos Philips
Miklos is a UX designer, product design strategist, author, and speaker with more than 18 years of experience in the design field.
Agile UX: How to Incorporate UX and Product Design Into Agile
As UX strategy and design become increasingly important, the challenge of incorporating UX specialists into Agile methodologies becomes equally important.
In this article, Toptal Freelance UX Designer Debbie Levitt explains how UX designers and creative teams can be effectively incorporated at all stages of Agile development.
Debbie Levitt
Debbie has been a UX strategist, designer, consultant, and trainer for more than 20 years.
RxSwift and Animations in iOS
iOS developers love the power of UIKit, and animating a UIView is usually fairly easy. However, if you want to chain animations together and set up dependencies between them, your code can quickly become difficult to read with many nested closures and indentation levels.
In this article, I’ll explore how to apply the power of a reactive framework such as RxSwift to make that code look much cleaner as well as easier to read and follow. My client wanted a story told through a sequence of animations rather than by playing a pre-rendered video, and with RxSwift, we easily tweaked it to perfection.
Vadim Dagman
Vadim is a seasoned freelance developer, architect, technical manager, and entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience.
Most-read Articles
An Angular 5 Tutorial: Step by Step Guide to Your First Angular 5 App
Adobe XD vs. Sketch – Which UX Tool Is Right for You?
The History of Remote Work, 1560-Present (with Infographic) (Updated)
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