Toptal Blog

While preprocessors like Sass and Less have made CSS development easier, there is still a lot to be desired in this modern age of web development.

In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Jeremy Davis explores styled-components—the niftiest CSS-in-JS library.

In the last Super Bowl when the New England Patriots faced off against the Philadelphia Eagles, Americans bet a staggering $4.76 billion on the game. 97% of that figure was done so illegally. However, this will likely change by the time the next Super Bowl rolls around. In a hotly anticipated move on May 14, 2018, the US Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, paving the way for states to legalize sports betting.

This article covers the foundations of sports betting, including its $150 billion market size, implementation timeline, and revenue distribution. It will also examine the implications of its legalization, including increased sports engagement and popularity, ethical concerns, fresh opportunities, and its impact on fantasy sports and eSports.

Want to become a phenomenal designer? Take a multidisciplinary design approach and study the methods of other design disciplines.

Every month, we bring you riveting design news and inspiring content focused on design innovation. Here are five hand-picked pieces of design news.

With venture funding having grown more than 120% in the US in the last five years, startup founders and investors alike have grown increasingly comfortable with low margin business models. But the successes of the Amazons and Facebooks of this world often mask failure in a slew of other sectors, where the “build it and they will come” model doesn’t always work.

In this article, Toptal Finance Expert Toby Clarence-Smith brings attention back to the importance of studying a business’ long-term sustainability prospects, with a particular focus on unit economics, one of the building blocks of profitability and breakeven analysis for startups.

When having the right UX tools is the crucial difference between having a highly effective design workflow, and one that’s slow and unproductive, it’s important to stay up to date with the latest tools.

Computational photography is about enhancing the photographic process with computation. While we normally tend to think that this applies only to post-processing the end result (similar to photo editing), the possibilities are much richer since computation can be enabled at every step of the photographic process—starting with scene illumination.

In this article, Toptal OpenCV Expert Radu Balaban walks us through two examples of computational photography: low light and high dynamic range.

Of the three functional categories that drive value in business—i.e., the “hard,” the “soft,” and the “intangible”—mission statements comfortably reside in the third, alongside such concepts as brand and culture.

But despite the skepticism that is often associated with this category, and having uncovered some of the greatest gems in the corporate arena, this article argues that mission statements, when crafted and utilized effectively, are capable of driving billions of dollars in value.

Following some basic mobile app design best practices and avoiding the most common mistakes will help designers create apps that live past the crucial 90-day mark when 71% are abandoned.

Threading is just one of the many ways concurrent programs can be built. In this article, we will take a look at threading and a couple of other strategies in building concurrent programs in Python, as well as discuss how each is suitable in different scenarios.

Eyeballing the top-line figures of company growth is unlikely to uncover anything particular radical. To understand the trends that lead to user growth, retention, and/or engagement, statistical tools should be employed to test the underlying drivers behind performance.

Users form mental models around how products should work through use. In order to design for maximum usability, designers need to understand and leverage users’ mental models.

With $936 billion of uninvested private equity capital inching down market, why do 46% to 80% of lower middle market sell-side transactions fail to close? The usual answer is that companies are not ready for buyers’ examination and owners can be overly optimistic or even greedy.

Business owners can do much more to put themselves in the driver’s seat. Success boils down to the following: (1) take the time and do the work to prepare for an exit transaction and (2) apply “intelligent greed” to close your best deal.

Creating meaningful designs, capturing customer attention, and influencing their behavior is something that designers and marketers will agree is one of the most difficult things to achieve.

Mobile applications are creeping in. Developing for each mobile platform can be an exhaustive task, especially if resources are limited. This is where Apache Cordova comes in handy by providing a way to develop mobile applications using standard web technologies - HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. This article explores how one can get started with Apache Cordova and build mobile applications targeted at a wide range of mobile devices.

Fewer than 3% of applicants make it through Toptal Finance’s rigorous screening process. How do the best of the best become such effective financial consultants? We sat down with one of Toptal’s most on-demand financial consultants, Jeffrey Fidelman, who shared his proprietary methods for ensuring success for his clients and how he has grown his own business exponentially.

Two Toptal designers engage in a lively debate about aesthetics, objectivity, and the definition of art and design.

Do you run deployment scripts from your development machine, or find yourself referring to deployments by the day of the week they were deployed, instead of using version numbers? It’s time for a better solution.

In this article, Freelance Ruby Engineer and automation enthusiast Amin Shah Gilani walks you through his perfect deployment pipeline to use at the beginning of your project. With this CI/CD configuration, every push is tested, the master branch is deployed to staging servers with a fresh database dump from the production server, and versioned tags are deployed to production with backups and migrations running automatically.

VC and PE fund structures are traditionally raised in the closed-ended manner, through limited partnerships with end dates. A less common alternative to this is an open-ended/evergreen fund, an ongoing structure that continues indefinitely. In this article we discuss the nuances of open-ended funds with a GP from B37 Ventures, who raised and operates one.

No matter what design discipline you are working in—whether it’s visual design, UX, or traditional print—typefaces are essential elements of virtually every bit of design produced.

The most progressive and interesting designers steer clear of visually stale design solutions and ditch restrictive rules by learning UI design best practices and avoiding common design mistakes.