Toptal Blog

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.

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#.

As project managers, we are sometimes tasked with taking over a project in progress. In this guide, we will outline how to execute a seamless project takeover. Use the included checklist for your upcoming projects.

World’s worst logo? It’s a distinction no company wants to claim but a problem every logo designer would love to solve. We swing for the fences with a logo refresh for a global dancercise brand.

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 we can attract more consulting clients.

Steve’s advice is a bit counter-intuitive. But it’s something that Toptal’s best consultants have already been doing for years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Startups play poker, large companies play chess. In this article, we compare and contrast startup project management 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.

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 runs through an often overlooked way of solving this situation: the chart of accounts. A well-structured chart of accounts is often the single best and most effective way to raise the financial reporting of an organization to the next level.

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).

JavaScript is an oddball of a language with numerous approaches to almost any problem. When ES6 added the “class” keyword, did it save the day or just muddy the waters? In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Justen Robertson explores OOP in modern JS.

How do product teams avoid wasting months of valuable time building something no one wants? Apply the iterative validation principles of Lean UX and create products that their end-users actually need.

Project management tools have dramatically transformed the way software is engineered, but which one should you use, and when?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Juan Carlos Arias Ambriz outlines the differences between Jira and Trello and explains how you should choose between them.