Colin co-founded Caktus Consulting Group in 2007. Before Caktus, he worked as a web developer and programmer at Earlham and Oberlin college and was also a developer at a small, Macintosh software company.

Colin's skills include Django web development and Python programming. He's a proponent of automated testing and continuous integration, PEP8 coding conventions, and is always looking to improve our deployment process.

Colin helped organize several Django sprints in the Chapel Hill area during the 1.2 release push and regularly contributes to the open source reusable Django apps developed at Caktus. He also frequents local meetups, including TriZPUG and Refresh The Triangle.

After graduating from college, Tobias took a year off to bicycle through South America before moving to North Carolina and co-founding Caktus Consulting Group in 2007. Before Caktus, Tobias owned and operated a small software and web hosting company for a number of years and supported his college career writing statistics software in his home town of Ithaca, NY.

Tobias is an active member of both the Django and RapidSMS communities and makes regular contributions to the projects.  He is the co-author of and chief advocate for the messages framework that was introduced in Django 1.2 and has helped Colin organize several successful Django development sprints in the North Carolina Research Triangle area.

Tobias's skills include database-enabled web development, software engineering, and Linux system administration. When he's not writing software, Tobias loves cooking, making pottery, and cycling.

Alex Lemann is a founding member of Caktus Consulting Group. He was involved in the computer science groups at Earlham working on a number of projects including research on theory of formal languages, computational science education using cluster computing, and embedded systems used to collect data on weather and energy consumption.

Alex splits his time between Caktus and continuing his computer science studies at DePaul University where he is finishing up a Masters degree. At DePaul, Alex has focused on data analysis using both statistical as well as machine learning techniques.

Alex has a wide variety of geeky interests such as learning about open source technology and communities, cluster computing, energy monitoring, software engineering, and user experience design. When taking a break from work and studies he enjoys gardening, playing with his dogs, and running.

Karen has been working with Django since late 2006, when she set out to put a web front-end on her crossword puzzle database. She was impressed by the framework and its community and began answering questions on the django-users mailing list and helping out with ticket triage and bug fixes. She became a Django core committer in September 2008 and continues to enjoy helping users, participating in local sprints, and contributing to Django's development. She is the author of Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging, published by Packt Publishing in April, 2010.

Before getting involved with Django, Karen worked for several years in the computer industry on various software products centered on communications protocols and middleware. She received a PhD in Electrical/Computer Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, where her graduate research focused on distributed operating systems.

Karen is also a crossword puzzle constructor; she has published around 100 puzzles in The New York Times and other national newspapers. Outside of puzzles and Django work Karen enjoys volunteering with Alley Cats and Angels, a local cat rescue organization dedicated to improving the lives and reducing the population of homeless cats in the Triangle area.

Mark recently turned the skills he gained working on Wall Street to the web. Whether it's writing server side code in Django or a slick UI with jQuery, Mark enjoys bringing his passion for web development to Caktus. He stays up to date on the latest search engine optimization and web standards through local meetings. Mark is active in the local Python community and has helped organize events to encourage learning Python. You can also find him answering Django questions on Stackoverflow.

Mark is a proud alumnus of NC State and New York University. He is an active runner and enjoys micro-brew beers, college sports, and spending time with his family.

The baby of the group Michael graduated from UNC-CH in 2008 with a B.S. in Physics & Astronomy and research interests in computational neuroscience.  A native North Carolinian, he spends most of his free time doing community organizing in the Triangle.  Having spent the past few years working for himself and traveling he met the fine fellows at Caktus and bonded over a shared love of opensource programming.

Even before graduating with a BSIS from UNC Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science in 2007, Cristóbal has been on the Steering Committee of the Triangle Linux Users group. He has also worked to keep ibiblio.org and a few other domains humming by providing systems and application support. A tinkerer, he spends too much of his free time installing various *nix flavors, backporting packages, and making plugins, but he is not content to tinker just with software; he tends to carry too many tools with him wherever he goes. With family in Chapel Hill, Cristóbal is a Carrborian who can often be seen on one of his bikes when not at a keyboard. Photography and audio engineering are two other avocations.