Best Practices

Software Development Guidelines

Drew Leske

Regardless of language or environment, there are core principles we follow in software development, to encourage readability, maintainability, and joy. Each member of the team is responsible for adhering to these principles and guidelines and to assist and encourage others in doing so.

Issue and merge request workflows

Drew Leske

In which we describe issue and MR lifecycles and workflow

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.

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.

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.

Indentation and Styling Guide

by Karan Gosal, 25 October 2023

Indentation is more than just a matter of aesthetics in coding; in some languages like Python, it holds a semantic value. It’s a fundamental part of how code is structured and readable. It helps to organize your code, making it easier to understand and maintain. In this blog post, we will explore the basic indentation rules for four popular programming languages: JavaScript, HTML, Django, and Python.