Toptal Blog

UI components are about modularity and reusability. A/B testing can be employed very effectively during a lean product development process to test components that make up an application’s UI.

Oracles are changing the way we view and create smart contracts. How do we implement them in Ethereum, using nothing but Solidity and standard dev tools?

In the first article of our three-part series, Toptal Blockchain Developer John R. Kosinski explains how to get started and compile a smart contract with oracles.

Traditionally, connecting devices for peer-to-peer communications has been a tedious task: An application needs to discover what’s around it, open connections on both sides, and then maintain them as network infrastructure, connections, distances, etc. Realizing the difficulties inherent in these activities, in iOS 7 and macOS 10.10 Apple introduced its MultipeerConnectivity framework.

Join Toptal Freelance iOS Developer Ben Gottlieb as he explains what MultipeerConnectivity is, and teaches us how to use it.

Have you ever wondered if you can apply Design Thinking principles with a limited time and budget? If so check this out, this is an in-depth Design Thinking Case Study which details how Design Thinking helped a company to save its product.

Hidden in Excel and Power BI is a powerful data analysis pack named Get and Transform. It is an ETL pack for cleaning and sorting raw data from a range of input sources, such as CSV and text files. This tutorial demonstrates how Get & Transform can help the data analyst both save time and uncover more insight.

Let’s face it, robots are cool. In this post, Toptal Engineer Nick McCrea provides a step-by-step, easy-to-follow tutorial (with code samples) that walks you through the process of building a basic autonomous mobile robot.

There are many UX design tools on the market, but their capabilities vary. This review examines the effectiveness of Sketch, Axure, and Figma with a task-based comparison.

Possibly with the exception of color, the typeface styles used in a design have a greater impact on the way a user perceives that design than virtually any other individual design element.

The humble ERC20 token specification has become the de facto standard for Ethereum tokens. If you come across an Ethereum smart contract, chances are it’s ERC20-compliant.

In this guide, Toptal Freelance Ethereum Developer Gilad Haimov demonstrates how you can create and deploy your own ERC20 token in under an hour.

The existence of RESTful APIs is a popular myth in web development—but it’s a myth we can work with. The right tools can help keep documentation consistent and streamline automated testing. In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Alexander Zinchuk explores several time-saving approaches to developing REST APIs, with examples in Node.js and Ruby on Rails.

Relatively unknown until recently, representation and warranty insurance is an interesting—and often extremely effective—tool for helping M&A deals cross the finishing line. By shifting the financial risk for breaches of representation and warranties to an insurance firm, these arrangements can enable sellers to receive all the purchase price proceeds at closing as opposed to being exposed to liquidity risk post deal close.

The first of a two-part series, this primer on reps and warranty insurance by M&A expert Javier Enrile is aimed at educating readers on what representation and warranty insurance is and how it works, followed by an overview of the drafting process.

Conversational user interfaces are a new frontier that requires thoughtful consideration. The design process should include defining the purpose of the chatbot, and other design considerations to create a successful user experience.

There are two dominant patterns of implementation for inversion of control. Which one is better, and is there a middle path to be found between them? How should you approach IoC to get the most out of your code?

Join Toptal Java Developer Martin Coll in exploring the familiar and unknown landscape of IoC development.

Bad B2B UX is everywhere—but the situation is not hopeless. By understanding the pitfalls, and having a strategic user-centered design plan, designers can pave the way to saving enterprise software.

Top PMs are always in demand in organizations around the globe. This is a list of some really useful habits Top PMs possess. Hopefully, they will help you to become one or check if you already have these habits at your disposal.

Budgeting can be a drawn-out process, yet oftentimes once the year starts and results diverge, they become forgotten. Instead of budgeting just with qualitative methods, managers should combine them with quantitative tools. Comparing regressed historic trends with future expectations can be more accurate and ultimately ensure the budget survives the year.

Manually gathering information about user-generated data is time-consuming, to say the least. That’s why more organizations are turning to automatic sentiment analysis methods—but basic models don’t always cut it. In this article, Toptal Freelance Data Scientist Rudolf Eremyan gives an overview of some sentiment analysis gotchas and what can be done to address them.

Learn about the evolution of design systems and how designers can adopt a holistic approach to systems thinking.

The Raspberry Pi is a little computer that you can get for as low as USD $5 and on which you can run many different types of software and build many different projects. In this article, I’m going to guide you through the process of setting it up as a home development server and deploying a full-stack JavaScript application that you can access from outside your network. This is great for setting up your own remote digital workspace, or simply to have control over the hardware you use for development.

Uploading a video to YouTube seems like a simple enough task, but non-existent documentation and unmaintained libraries can make even the simplest of tasks seem daunting.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Django Developer Ivan Carmo da Rocha Neto guides you through how to post YouTube videos from your Django app.

Because graphic design and visual design both focus on aesthetics, the line between the two disciplines is often blurred, especially when referencing digital designs (includes infographic).