Log
Here the ARCsoft team write about things we’ve learned or are excited about! Each member contributes an article periodically, both as part of our mission to contribute to the community as well as to grow personally and professionally.
Working with OpenStack
by Lee Napthine, 31 January 2025
Recently, I built a program that directly interacts with OpenStack cloud operations and its various components. It was a solid learning experience, and I want to share what I learned so future ARCsoft developers can hit the ground running.
Background and context for the Software Development Guidelines
by Drew Leske, 28 January 2025
It can take a while to learn a team’s culture, and there’s no quick solve for that: it’s the culmination not only of the group’s shared experience but the years of lived experience each individual brings in, and it evolves over time and is always unique. Expected practice, on the other hand, can and should be clarified–and if your team culture has “inclusion” as a core tenet, then setting clear expectations is essential to keeping everybody on the same page.
Build a todolist with SolidJS
by Archie To, 10 December 2024
ARCsoft recently decided to use SolidJS as the frontend framework for our future projects. If you’re new to SolidJS, don’t be afraid. Let’s learn SolidJS together by building a simple todolist app. Disclaimer: I, by no means, am an expert in SolidJS. Therefore, the code I write here is NOT guaranteed to follow all best practices, though I promise to do my best. I welcome any constructive feedback that you have on SolidJS standards and will make necessary updates to the blog post.
Creating Custom Modules for the ARCsoft Library
by Lee Napthine, 9 December 2024
At ARCsoft we have begun building a repository of custom Helpers libraries that will be included in future projects. First on the docket was looking at several giant UI test code blocks in Django. These often span dozens of modules and thousands of lines of code. Quite common throughout was the use of repetitive and non-descriptive JsonResponse calls. Let’s walk through how we compartmentalized these calls into a more cohesive set of custom JsonResponse classes and how we added them to our repository of custom methods that we will use here at ARCsoft. Along the way we will document the setup of the Helpers repository and the essential inclusions to a project for the package to be able to be used, imported, and published.
Web Performance using CDNs, Async, and Defer
by Lee Napthine, 30 November 2024
On the ZooDB project I was tasked with looking into the case for and against
using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) rather than the locally hosted frameworks
we had currently set up. A decision was made to try them along with their async
and defer script attributes to determine whether web performance increased and
in which areas.
Getting Setup in Visual Studio Code
by Lee Napthine, 19 September 2024
This blog post gets us started with Visual Studio Code (VS Code). It is intended for onboarding at ARCsoft, and should help sync IDE enironments with the Git projects. Topics include install, startup, formatting, extensions, and shortcuts.
Project versioning and tagging
by Drew Leske, 20 August 2024
Lately we’ve been discussing project versions and tagging for both releases and packaging. This has come up for tags on container images, and we also have developed a couple of Python libraries which we may want to publish to a public repository. While tags on container images have fairly relaxed restrictions, the Python Package Index for example follows a very prescriptive specification for versioning, and ideally we can find a solution that will work for both and is reasonably meaningful and intuitive.
Use Terraform to deploy Helm charts
by Archie To, 17 July 2024
We’ve talked about Terraform and Helm. Those surely are cool technologies. But you know what’s even cooler? When you combine both of those. This article will show you how to use Terraform to deploy Helm charts, a very popular practice for our infrastructure in ARCsoft. This article requires some prerequisites: readers must read about Terraform and Helm first. So if you haven’t, go read those, I can wait. Why use Terraform to deploy Helm charts?
Using syntax trees in Python
by Bhavy Rai, 2 July 2024
I’ve recently been working on a project where I needed to parse and update Django model files by adding new fields. Initially, I used plain string manipulation for parsing, but it quickly became too complex and error-prone. To address this, I switched to using syntax trees, specifically concrete syntax trees (CSTs), for parsing. In this post, I’ll discuss how I leveraged syntax trees in Python to handle Django model files more effectively.
Adapt a new frontend framework for ARCsoft - SolidJS
by Archie To, 18 June 2024
ARCsoft recently decided to add SolidJS as a new frontend framework to their tech stacks. We have implemented SolidJS on several projects and the results have been promising. In this article, we’ll explore why we needed a frontend framework and what SolidJS offers as a solution. A need for client-side rendering Some background - CSR vs SSR First, let’s define client-side rendering (CSR) vs server-side rendering (SSR): CSR: In short, your website is rendered on the browser.