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.
One of the most powerful features that come with Django is the ORM
(object-relational mapping). It allows you to easily fetch data from the
database by writing intuitive Python code. However, if you don’t know (maybe
read a different article if you do), there is more to
Django’s ORM than the simple objects.get and objects.filter. This article
aims to take your ability to use the Django’s ORM to the next level.
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.
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.
STRAP is one of the most important projects that ARCsoft is working on. To deploy applications onto STRAP, we use a user-friendly web application named Strapper. Today, I will show you a quick demo of how we can have an application up and running with just a few clicks using Strapper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.