Tobias McNulty

Editor’s note: This post was updated on July 17th, 2025, to use the PATH_add hook for direnv and to recommend including uv sync --locked in your .envrc file.

Three Cakti recently attended DjangoCon Europe 2025 in Dublin and it was a wonderful experience! It was great to see and chat with various Django community members we usually only see once or twice a year. Beyond that, we were most impressed by the consistently high quality of the talks throughout all three days of the conference. It was a pleasure to listen to so many excellent presentations, including the lightning talks at the end of each day. Here are some of our favorite talks.

Django and its admin interface are a big part of why Caktus uses Django, but the admin's ability to log database changes is limited. For example, it shows only changes made via the Django admin, not via other parts of the site.

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!

Introduction

regexp_matches() and regexp_match() are two similar string functions that support regular expression matching directly in the PostgreSQL database. regexp_matches() was added in PostgreSQL 8.3, and regexp_match() was added in PostgreSQL 10 (keep reading to see how ChatGPT struggled to answer this question).

This past week, I learned that it's possible to run Tailscale in a local docker-compose.yml on a developer's workstation, and securely allow access to services in the docker-compose file to other users on your Tailnet.

Sometimes, it’s necessary to deploy a set of features and/or bug fixes to production before part of the current “testing” branch has been tested completely in a Q/A or staging environment.

We use factory_boy for bootstrapping test data on many Python and Django projects at Caktus. Recently, we encountered a deprecation warning on an older project that had been using factory_boy for some time:

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.

ODK is a popular tool for offline data collection with a thriving user community. Like a number of other offline data collection tools, it uses the XLSForm standard for authoring forms. While convenient to author and exchange, authoring the forms in Excel means each iteration of the form must be uploaded to the ODK Central server that distributes forms to mobile data collection applications, such as ODK Collect.