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.
Manual creation of GitLab projects has been okay, but consistency among projects for such as protected tags requires a procedure be followed, which tends to be a brittle solution. Using Terraform we can create projects configured as we like them, with the added bonus of easily disabling all the features we don't need.
Upper Bound is easily one of the larger conferences I’ve attended. It lists 8,000 attendees and 250 speakers, encompassing several key sectors: education, health care, science, culture, policy and engineering, across the axes of academia, government, and industry. The potential for cross-pollination is high.
In this post, I walk through setting up pgvector in Django, working with dense and sparse vectors, and performing similarity queries, along with an important warning about sparse vector indexing that can break your results.
Sometimes, branching a new feature off of an existing one is necessary, but it often makes rebasing feel like a nightmare. In this post, I share my personal approach to keeping a clean project history when dealing with these “grandchild” branches.
Software development with AI is becoming more and more popular. AI can help developers write code faster, debug issues quicker, and improve overall productivity. However, in an environment where privacy and security are deep concerns such as UVic, we need to be more careful about how AI is used.
Our team recently investigated using AI for log anomaly detection. One of the several approaches was querying Large Language Models (LLMs) through the Ollama API. This article documents the journey from initial exploration to a production-ready API call, including the tools we discovered, the prompt engineering techniques that worked, and best practices for the team moving forward.
We’ve been building REST APIs for some of our projects. One of the struggles that I’ve personally faced was deciding on the URL structure for the endpoints. After some trials and errors and learning from others, here is a set of conventions that I think we should follow.
In a recent client project, we needed to mirror a specific subdirectory from our GitLab monorepo to a GitHub repository–complete with version history. This article explains why we chose Git Subtree over simpler approaches, the challenges we encountered, and how we implemented a mirroring solution in our CI pipeline.
In our CI pipelines, we originally relied on Docker-in-Docker (DinD)–which worked, but not without its drawbacks. This article aims to clarify why DinD is not apt for container image builds and why we shifted to using Buildah instead.
ARCsoft recently came across a project that uses Svelte. The framework is pretty neat and it comes with many unique features compared to other frontend technologies. Let’s discover those features together in this article.