Teams and Processes

Freelancers work flexible hours, but this convenience comes at a price: They have to manage their time better than on-site professionals. However, it also means they’re free to optimize their routine and achieve exceptional efficiency.

In this post, software engineer Dmitry Ryazantsev will guide you through the ins and outs of personal time management, leaving little to chance. What good are great rates if you waste hours each week?

If you’re a veteran frontender, you’ve probably had some not-so-great experiences with designers, and chances are some designers have had an equally bad experience working with you. How can you make sure you get exactly what you need from your designer, without placing an undue burden on them?

It’s a tall order, but in this article Freelance Software Engineer Vedran Aberle Tokic outlines and addresses a number of potential issues that may become roadblocks for your execution. Implementing these suggestions may result in overhead for designers, but they can save enormous amounts of time and headache elsewhere.

How do you define good code? Is it 100% test coverage, or is it backwards compatibility with decade-old hardware? We may not be able to reach an end to this debate yet, but good software always seems to conform to a few certain qualities of code.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Zachary Goldberg walks us through six simple ideas that can help you make better, more maintainable software.

What’s the biggest problem with crowdfunding today? Everyone wants a sweet slice of the crowdfunded pie, but nobody wants a single crumb of responsibility. As a result, crowdfunding platforms, the tech press, and the geek public have picked up a track record filled with spectacular crowdfunding failures.

In this article, Toptal Technical Editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic takes a look at the state of crowdfunding today and explains why the industry needs to do more to clean up its act and get rid of bad apples in crowdfunding.

Many product owners don’t have a technical background and thus often find themselves unprepared and scrambling when it comes to bringing on a new development team. This often results in hindered progress, wasted time, and frustration for everyone involved. If this sounds like it could be you, either now or in the future, then you should be somewhat concerned.

In this blog post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Carlos Ramirez III will walk you through the various steps of a typical transition process in project management so you can prepare for this eventuality and make the transition as smooth as possible.

Small teams frequently have to compete with bigger, more structured organizations who are capable of allocating more resources to project management, and software release management in particular. This means that small teams, or even individual developers, need to properly organize and execute their release process in order to keep up.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Lucas Mancini focuses specifically on small startups, teams that don’t have, or can’t afford, DevOps support, or teams that don’t have a formal process defined for releasing new versions of their product. The author provides a suggested checklist method to manage releases, tailored to match his past experience working on different projects, together with some recommended best practices and guidelines.

There are a number of things which motivated me to start my current company. Breaking away from client work while retaining all the benefits of being a location independent freelancer was one of them.

We’re a team of 10 now, serving more than 1,500 businesses worldwide. We have an office in Berlin, but many of us work remotely. In this article, I’ll dig into to the principles, tools and lessons that have helped us along the way. After reading it, I hope you’ll be able to architect your software company so it’s remote-friendly right from the start.

The Art of War is an ancient military treatise, but despite its age, the text is still included in the syllabus at many military schools. Sun Tzu’s principles and teachings also have practical applications in politics, business, sports, and, believe it or not, software development. In fact, you might just be applying some of these principles in your daily routine, without even knowing.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jose F. Maldonado explains why many of these ancient teachings still matter, and what you can do to make them work for you and your team.

Handling all validation in domain objects results in objects that are huge and complex to work with. In domain-driven design, using decoupled validator components allows your code to be much more reusable and enables validation rules to rapidly grow.

In this article, Toptal engineer Josip Medic shows us how validation can be decoupled from domain objects, made context-specific, and structured well to achieve more sustainable validation code.

Maintainable code is something we all desire and there are no shortage of coding principles that promise it. It is not always apparent how tremendously useful these principles are during the early stages of development. Nonetheless, the effort put in to ensure these qualities certainly pay off as the project grows and development continues. In this article, Toptal engineer Adel Fayzrakhmanov discusses how the Single Responsibility Principle is one of the most important aspect in writing good maintainable code.

Whether you’re creating a virtual storefront, deploying an app, or simply doing some third-party testing and development, chances are you need some server muscle. The good news is that there is a lot to choose from. The hosting industry may not be loud or exciting, but it never sleeps; it’s a dog eat dog world, with cutthroat pricing, a lot of innovation behind the scenes, and cyclical hardware updates.

In this article, we take a look at hosting options for freelance software engineers: PaaS, Cloud, VPS, dedicated, and more.

Using modern DevOps Tools like Chef, Docker, Ansible, Packer, Troposphere, Consul, Jenkins, SonarQube, AWS, etc., does not mean that you are applying DevOps principles. DevOps is a way of thinking.

The Toptal Global Mentors program is designed to help novice developers around the world improve their skills and create new career opportunities. In our diverse, yet interconnected global industry, cutting-edge skills are always in short supply. The program aims to bridge the gap between skilled software engineers in developed countries and students from across the globe, who aspire to join the industry.

Is open source scary? Do developers think that nobody would be interested in their personal projects? What are the fears associated with publishing your own work for the public to see? In this article, Toptal Director of Engineering Anna Chiara Bellini shares how, as an accomplished engineer, she made her first contribution to GitHub. This guide features all the step-by-step basics to getting involved in open source, including everything from what open source software is, to how to start working with Git and GitHub, to actually making meaningful contributions to open source projects.

Toptal has a strong remote culture), to say the least. To keep up with each other, we need a tool to keep team members in sync, where we can reach any other person at a moment’s notice. We use Skype as our main communication channel among Toptal’s core team.

Over the years, Skype has grown a lot, and has become a versatile tool that can be used on all of your devices at once, syncing chat amongst them, and providing a simple way to call and share screens. It is a tool that we leverage every day for our internal operations.

As heavy Skype users, there are a few things we’ve noticed that might not be clear to everyone. Here are a few tips on how you and your remote team can get the most of of Skype.

Many developers often overlook, or do not thoroughly think through the implications of open source licenses. Whether you’re planning to open source your own project under one of these licenses, or you intend to integrate some other open source project into one of your own, it’s important to have at least some knowledge of what these licenses are, how they may affect your projects, and how they complement or contradict one another. In this article, Toptal engineer David Marín gives us a comprehensive guide to some of the most popular open source licenses, and several rules of thumb to follow when choosing a license for future open source projects.