Ronard Luna

Ronard is a native of La Pichinga, a small town in the Dominican Republic. He grew up in the Dominican Republic and moved to Utah to attend university. He joined Caktus as an Apprentice in July of 2021.

Caktus quickly became the perfect growing environment for a new developer. Ronard particularly enjoys how his coworkers are always willing to help, work together, and guide him to useful resources. He loves the sense of comradery that he has felt at Caktus since day one, which extends from the CEO to new hires. He also loves how Caktus has always placed strong importance on giving back to the community.

Ronard is a self-taught programmer and he particularly enjoys back-end development. When away from his keyboard he loves spending time with friends & family, watching all kinds of sports, playing fantasy basketball, reading (especially on human psychology, marketing, and science), and overall living a healthy lifestyle. He looks forward to one day getting out of the city and back to the great outdoors.

2025


Handling Configuration and Server Snippets When Upgrading to ingress-nginx 1.12.0

As part of our ongoing Sustainability and Maintenance efforts, we are upgrading our Kubernetes clusters to version 1.32. Much like a major Django upgrade, this process requires us to update other key components to ensure they remain compatible. One of these is the ingress-nginx controller, which manages external access to the cluster.

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Cakti Share Their Favorite Tools For Streamlined Workflows

Let’s jump into it!

At Caktus, we’re always looking for tools that help us streamline our workflows, increase productivity, and make our day-to-day tasks more efficient. Whether you’re managing projects, writing code, or debugging, the right tools can make all the difference. Here are some of our favorite tools that we love using to get the job done!

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Upgrade Smarter, Not Harder: Python Tools for Code Modernization

Upgrading projects is somewhat equivalent to flossing, you know you have to do it, but rarely make time for it. After all, if the project is in active development, there are exciting new features to build. And we all know that new features > project upgrades. Well not to worry, Caktus wants to make you aware of some tools that will save you from considerable repetitive work & time while simultaneously modernizing your codebase. Combined, these tools will automate part of the upgrade process, decreasing the likelihood of neglecting parts of the codebase.

A Helpful Guide to Solving Common Poetry Issues

We don't often use Poetry, the Python packaging and dependency management tool, but when we do, we usually look up and re-learn the same things repeatedly. This post is a quick reference for some of the recent issues we encountered when using Poetry.

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Deleting a Django Application from a Multi-Site Kubernetes Cluster

Recently, a client requested that we delete a website that was no longer used. The Kubernetes cluster was managed by an engineer who is no longer with the company, making the cluster feel like a concealed box. All I had was the website’s name. Since we use Ingress Nginx and Nginx as a web server, I figured the answer to my query could be found there. So I ran:

2024


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Reflections on DjangoCon US 2024: Highlights, Takeaways, and Community Connections

DjangoCon 2024 was a resounding success for the community, with attendees from all over the world gathering to learn about the latest developments in Django and to connect with the Django community. Caktus was well-represented at the conference, with six of our team members attending. In this blog post, we share our experiences at DjangoCon 2024, including our favorite talks, the people we met, and the things we learned. We also offer some tips for future attendees on how to get the most out of DjangoCon.

2023


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Upgrading PostgreSQL From v11 to v15 in Your Django Application

In the ever-evolving world of data management, staying up-to-date with the latest technologies and best practices is imperative. One crucial aspect of this is ensuring your PostgreSQL version remains current. On November 9, 2023, PostgreSQL 11 reaches end of life (EOL).

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Migrating a Django Project from a GPU to a Convenience Image on CircleCI

Recently we learned that as of September 30th, 2023 several linux images will be deprecated, including the one we used, ubuntu-2004:202111-02. Therefore, after September 30th, our pipelines would have failed. To avoid this, we switched several machines in our Django project from Ubuntu GPU images to convenience images; This writing details that switch.

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Migrate to Amazon EKS Add-ons

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) released support for operational cluster add-on software, or Amazon EKS add-ons, around Kubernetes version 1.19 in May 2021. These include:

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Set up AWS CloudTrail to Monitor Application Events using Ansible

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables monitoring and recording of account activities. In this post, we will use CloudTrail to monitor CPU usage and to monitor our nodes. We will use Ansible to automate the setup process and as a means to document our setup (IaC). This post assumes you already have Ansible set up for your project and will not provide setup instructions.