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During the last year we gave our popular technical blog an official name: Developer Access. We published 32 posts on the blog, including technical how-to’s, conference information, web development best practices and detailed guides. Among all those posts, 19 rose to the top of the popularity list (based on total pageviews):

1. A Guide To Creating An API Endpoint With Django REST Framework: Our most popular blog post was published on February 1, and the title is self-explanatory. Adding an API endpoint can take considerable time, but with the Django REST Framework tools, it can be done more quickly.

2. How to Use Django Bulk Inserts for Greater Efficiency: If you have an application that needs to insert a lot of data into a Django model, it pays to "chunk" those updates to the database.

3. How to Switch to a Custom Django User Model Mid-Project: Django documentation recommends starting projects with a custom user model, but what if you didn’t? See how to add a custom user model to an existing project on Django 2.0+.

4. Coding for Time Zones & Daylight Saving Time — Oh, the Horror: It’s difficult to program correctly when using times, dates, time zones, and daylight saving time. See why it’s so challenging and learn how to account for the nuances.

5. How to Set Up a Centralized Log Server with rsyslog: There are a myriad of ways to configure rsyslog (and centralized logging in general), often with little documentation about how best to do so. This post helps you consolidate logs with minimal resource overhead.

6. How to Import Multiple Excel Sheets in Pandas: Pandas is a powerful Python data analysis tool, used heavily in the data science community. At Caktus, in addition to using it for data exploration, we also incorporate it into Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes.

7. Why We Love Wagtail (and You Will, Too): Wagtail is a user-friendly content management system (CMS) that also provides a robust technical solution with customizable content management tools.

8. Django: Recommended Reading: It's important to read up on the latest industry trends and technologies to stay current and address client needs. Review our list of the books, blogs, and other documents that we’ve found to be the most accurate, helpful, and practical for Django development.

Book Review 9. A Review of ReportLab: PDF Processing with Python: Python has a great library for generating and manipulating PDFs: ReportLab. We read more about this extremely useful library in “ReportLab: PDF Processing with Python,” by Michael Driscoll. With a few caveats, it’s an excellent resource.

10. One Team’s Development Patterns With Vue.js and Django REST Framework: On a recent project, one of our development teams chose to use Vue.js, along with a Django back-end with Django REST Framework (DRF). See some of the development patterns they chose as they worked through a number of issues.

11. Our Favorite PyCon 2019 Presentations: PyCon 2019 attracted 3,393 attendees, including a group of six Cakti. Read about the fascinating, clever presentations.

12. How to Do Wagtail Data Migrations: Here’s a detailed guide for doing data migrations with StreamFields in the Wagtail CMS.

13. Book Review: Creating GUI Applications with wxPython: The book “Creating GUI Applications with wxPython” by Michael Driscoll, provides various techniques for programming GUI applications in Python using wxPython.

14. Be Quick or Eat Potatoes: A Newbie’s Guide to PyCon: PyCon 2019 was held in Cleveland from May 1 - 9. Read about the experience through the eyes of a first-time attendee.

15. Caktus Blog: Top 18 Posts of 2018: If you’re interested in looking back even further into our blog archive, check out our most popular posts from 2018.

16. DjangoCon 2019 Delivered Again: Again this year, DjangoCon more than delivered on its promise of something for everyone. The conference took place in San Diego and ran from September 22 - 26.

17. Caktus Adopts New Web Framework: Our April Fool’s joke announced that Caktus would build new projects using our new COBOL-based framework, ADD COBOL TO WEB. If you missed it, check it out for a good laugh.

18. Suggestions For Picking Up Old Projects: Often, we pick up a project that we either have not worked on in a long time, or haven’t worked on at all. In our efforts to work on such projects, a few things have been helpful both for becoming familiar with the projects more quickly, and for making the same projects easier to pick up in the future.

19. 7 Conferences We’re Looking Forward To: Cakti attended a number of conferences around the country. This list highlights ones from 2019 that we were looking forward to attending.

Thank you for reading our blog during the past year. We look forward to providing more sharp content in 2020, and we welcome any questions, suggestions, or feedback. Simply leave a comment below. We love hearing from you!

Happy New Year!

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