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

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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.

8 minute readContinue Reading
Vadim Dagman

Vadim Dagman

Vadim is a seasoned freelance developer, architect, technical manager, and entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience.

Survival Metrics: Getting to Grips with the Startup Burn Rate

Burn rate is one of the simplest, yet most fundamental metrics that investors and startups focus on. It pertains to the total cash spend of the business per month, which demonstrates both growth progress and potential runway that the business has to survive. This article introduces the burn rate concept and the tactics that can be applied to optimize it.

13 minute readContinue Reading
Pierre Francois

Pierre Francois

Pierre is a strategic finance professional focused on reporting, forecasting, internal controls, and ERP implementation.

Design Talks: Research in Action with UX Researcher Caitria O'Neill

On this week’s Design Talks we discuss research in action with Caitria O’Neill, a UX researcher at Airbnb. She studies people’s relationships with technology and how they behave with digital products.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Miklos Philips

Miklos Philips

Miklos is a UX designer, product design strategist, author, and speaker with more than 18 years of experience in the design field.

Breaking Down the Design Thinking Process

Design thinking goes beyond the usual problem-solving focus of most UI and UX designers and adds the aspect of deep empathy for the user to the entire product design lifecycle, increasing the prospect of success.

8 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.

Magento Performance Optimization Explained

Magento is an extremely popular eCommerce platform used by businesses of all sizes, so what can we do to make it faster and more efficient? In this article, Toptal Freelance Magento Developer Paul Mestereaga explains what you can do to improve the performance of your Magento site.

12 minute readContinue Reading
Paul-Catalin Mestereaga

Paul-Catalin Mestereaga

Paul is a devoted Magento developer, a real go-getter, and a person who is truly passionate about the web.

How to Leverage BLoC for Code Sharing in Flutter and AngularDart

Code reuse turns lazy developers into efficient geniuses. Imagine if you could write the majority of your code once and run it on the web and native mobile—both iOS and Android.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Dart Developer Marko Perutović introduces us to the BLoC pattern, whereby you can isolate your business logic in pure Dart and reuse it in both Flutter and AngularDart.

10 minute readContinue Reading
Marko Perutović

Marko Perutović

Marko has 13+ years of experience with different technologies and team leadership. When coding, he loves to “keep it short and simple.”

Financial Clarity at Last: How to Reboot Your Chart of Accounts Structure in 7 Steps

It is quite common for financial reports to fall short of executives’ expectations. Accounting teams tend to focus on doing things the “right way” rather than asking readers of the financial statements what they want to see.

In this article, Toptal Finance Expert Scott Hoover demonstrates how to set up a chart of accounts and raise your organization’s financial reporting to the next level.

14 minute readContinue Reading
Scott Hoover

Scott Hoover

Scott is a CPA with three focus areas: high-level monthly financial oversight, accounting software projects, and corporate tax planning.

Dissecting the Intricacies of Typography Anatomy (with Infographic)

The letters used to construct our written languages have their own anatomical features. Here is a collection of lesser-known letter parts that every designer should be aware of (with an awesome infographic).

< 5 minute readContinue Reading
Micah Bowers

Micah Bowers

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

Project Management Evolution: Startups vs. Enterprises

Startups play poker, large companies play chess. In this article, we compare and contrast project management for startups with enterprise project management. Different challenges and opportunities arise in both settings. The best project managers should be able to utilize their skill sets to achieve the maximum results in both environments.

16 minute readContinue Reading
Vytas Butkus

Vytas Butkus

Vytas is a professional project and product manager leading products and projects in advertising technology, 3D graphics, and eCommerce.

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