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.

Adding Custom Regions with Colours to the Leaflet Maps

by Karan Gosal, 19 March 2024

In our previous exploration of Leaflet mapping, we delved into the basics of creating a dynamic map, adding markers to it, and also clustering the marker groups. Building upon that foundation, let’s elevate our map’s visual appeal and informational depth by incorporating custom regions with distinct colours. This step-by-step guide will walk us through the process, from obtaining GeoJSON data to adding regions to the map and interactive styling to our regions.

Reducing testing times with parallelization

by Bhavy Rai, 15 March 2024

As your test suite grows, so does the time it takes to run it. This can be a major bottleneck in your development process, especially if you’re following a TDD approach like we are. In this post, I’ll give a brief overview of how parallelization can be used to reduce testing times, and how it can beimplemented in local and CI environments, as well as the many headache-inducing issues that can arise from it. Grab a bottle of Tylenol, and a glass of water, and let’s dive in! 🤕

Introduction to Kubernetes

by Archie To, 11 March 2024

This article is meant for total newbies (such as myself a month ago) in Kubernetes. I will try to explain Kubernetes and some of its basic concepts in the simplest terms possible. However, we assume that you already know some basics about Docker containers. If you don’t, I recommend checking out our Docker basics article.

Splitting a string list in Python

by Drew Leske, 5 March 2024

I’m definitely a fan of list comprehensions in Python (as well as dict comprehensions), but I have some pretty specific ideas about how they should be formatted to be readable. Dict comprehensions are more complex, but even the much simpler list comprehensions can be abused, or misleading even when used well.

Strategies to increase Django performance

by Bhavy Rai, 1 March 2024

We found as development on ZooDB progressed and the amount of data involved increased, especially with intricate queries involved in each view, page loads became slower than we'd like. In this blog post we describe some of the strategies we used to improve performance.

Enhancing Django Applications with Django Easy Audit and Redis Caching

by Karan Gosal, 29 February 2024

In today’s digital landscape, where security and performance are paramount concerns, developers strive to implement robust solutions to monitor activities within their applications while optimizing performance. Django, a high-level Python web framework, offers a great set of tools and packages to assist developers in achieving these goals. In this blog post, we will explore a powerful Django package: Django Easy Audit for logging and integration of Django applications with Redis for caching.

Containerize a Django application

by Archie To, 14 February 2024

It is common and considered good pratice for applications to be containerized in production environments. Conterization allows apps to run in a separate environment from the host machine, which results in performance reliability, to implement multiple micro services that work closely with each other, and to be shipped with ease. In this article, Archie will show a surface-level way of how a Django application can be containerized with Docker.

Web testing with Selenium

by Bhavy Rai, 9 February 2024

We've in the past covered linting and unit tests, but the first checks code structure and style and the second tends to test backend or internal functionality. This blog post looks at testing what the user sees on the frontend.

Interactive Maps - Introduction to Leaflet

by Karan Gosal, 30 December 2023

In today’s world, maps play a crucial role in visualizing information and aiding navigation. Whether we are developing a website, mobile application, or simply want to embed an interactive map on our blog, Leaflet is a powerful tool that can help us to achieve just that. In this blog post, we will walk through all the necessary steps to set up Leaflet gradually. By the end of the blog, we will have a fully functional interactive map desired.

Introduction to the OpenStack SDK

by Nick Wurzer, 13 December 2023

OpenStack is open source software for running cloud services. Recently I worked on a Python program that would scan ARC cloud instances and determine which instances have been running longer than their allotted time. This mostly used the compute API which is a proxy for OpenStack’s Nova service.