Tobias McNulty on Caktus Group

DjangoCon US 2025: A Celebration of Community, Code and 20 Years of Django

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 09:00:00 -0500

Celebrating 20 years of Django

DjangoCon US 2025 was a milestone year for the community, as we gathered in Chicago to celebrate 20 years of Django. Attendees from around the world came together to learn about the latest developments, share their work, and strengthen the bonds that make DjangoCon such a special event. Caktus was well-represented once again, with our team contributing as organizers, speakers, and active participants throughout the week.

Happy 20th Birthday Django!

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 12:27:30 -0400

This Tuesday (tomorrow!), August 12th, we’re teaming up with TriPython to host an informal Django Birthday event at Boxyard RTP in Durham.

How to Migrate your Python & Django Projects to uv

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 05:00:00 +0000

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.

DjangoCon Europe 2025 Highlights

Tue, 27 May 2025 05:00:00 +0000

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.

Tips for Tracking Django Model Changes with django-pghistory

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

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.

Cakti Share Their Favorite Tools For Streamlined Workflows

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 20:09:03 +0000

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!

How to Use regexp_matches and regexp_match in PostgreSQL

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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).

Private, ngrok-like Dev Servers with Tailscale

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

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.

How to Deploy Selectively to Production

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

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.

How to fix factory_boy post-generation deprecation warnings

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 17:52:17 +0000

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:

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

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:00:00 +0000

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.

How to Automate Google Sheets to ODK Central

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 15:00:00 +0000

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.

How We Built a Caktus Cloud

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 16:15:00 +0000

As a research project this year at Caktus, we decided to build our own private cloud. Some of Caktus' clients prefer or require that their data and workloads remain on premises, which begs the question, "How can we bring a modern, cloud-like experience to an on-premises data center?"

How to Handle Django Login Redirects with HTMX

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 17:08:26 +0000

One of my favorite parts of working at Caktus is the community of developers who share knowledge within and outside our teams. Many of us work on different projects, but still take time to come together, share what we've learned, and apply those learnings to other projects.

Meet the New Owners of Caktus

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Nearly every week, I receive an email or two from a third party expressing interest in buying Caktus. As a matter of habit, I don't open them, let alone respond. Most are scattershot, venture capital firms looking for Software-as-a-Service companies (which Caktus is not). But when an employee approached me in 2018 expressing an interest in making Caktus employee-owned, I listened.

How to Decouple Your App From its Operating System with Docker

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 13:48:53 +0000

We regularly update and improve our upgrades and sustainability service offerings at Caktus, and a recent upgrade for a client precipitated a solution that I felt might be worth sharing. At Caktus, the preferred approach for addressing upgrades and sustainability is to make incremental updates to a project over time, trying to keep both Django and the servers themselves on a long-term support version. These are select versions of Django and Ubuntu, for example, that generally have much longer support periods than other versions, i.e., they are a good fit for applications that you will need to continue maintaining well into the future.

How to Use the "docker" Docker Image to Run Your Own Docker daemon

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 13:00:00 +0000

There exists on Docker hub a Docker image called docker. It also has two flavors, "stable" and a "dind" (Docker-in-Docker). What is this image for and what is the purpose of these two different image tags?

How to Set Up a Centralized Log Server with rsyslog

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 12:00:00 +0000

For many years, we've been running an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack for centralized logging. We have a specific project that requires on-premise infrastructure, so sending logs off-site to a hosted solution was not an option. Over time, however, the maintenance requirements of this self-maintained ELK stack were staggering. Filebeat, for example, filled up all the disks on all the servers in a matter of hours, not once, but twice (and for different reasons) when it could not reach its Logstash/Elasticsearch endpoint. Metricbeat suffered from a similar issue: It used far too much disk space relative to the value provided in its Elasticsearch indices. And while provisioning a self-hosted ELK stack has gotten easier over the years, it's still a lengthy process, which requires extra care anytime an upgrade is needed. Are these problems solvable? Yes. But for our needs, a simpler solution was needed.

How to Switch to a Custom Django User Model Mid-Project

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 16:32:33 +0000

The Django documentation recommends always starting your project with a custom user model (even if it's identical to Django's to begin with), to make it easier to customize later if you need to. But what are you supposed to do if you didn't see this when starting a project, or if you inherited a project without a custom user model and you need to add one?

How to Use Django Bulk Inserts for Greater Efficiency

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 13:00:00 +0000

It's been awhile since we last discussed bulk inserts on the Caktus blog. The idea is simple: if you have an application that needs to insert a lot of data into a Django model — for example a background task that processes a CSV file (or some other text file) — it pays to "chunk" those updates to the database so that multiple records are created through a single database operation. This reduces the total number of round-trips to the database, something my colleague Dan Poirier discussed in more detail in the post linked above.

Automating Dokku Setup with AWS Managed Services

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 13:30:00 +0000

Dokku is a great little tool. It lets you set up your own virtual machine (VM) to facilitate quick and easy Heroku-like deployments through a git push command. Builds are fast, and updating environment variables is easy. The problem is that Dokku includes all of your services on a single instance. When you run your database on the Dokku instance, you risk losing it (and any data that's not yet backed up) should your VM suddenly fail.

Managing your AWS Container Infrastructure with Python

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 13:30:00 +0000

We deploy Python/Django apps to a wide variety of hosting providers at Caktus. Our django-project-template includes a Salt configuration to set up an Ubuntu virtual machine on just about any hosting provider, from scratch. We've also modified this a number of times for local hosting requirements when our customer required the application we built to be hosted on hardware they control. In the past, we also built our own tool for creating and managing EC2 instances automatically via the Amazon Web Services (AWS) APIs. In March, my colleague Dan Poirier wrote an excellent post about deploying Django applications to Elastic Beanstalk demonstrating how we’ve used that service.

Here's a Production-Ready Dockerfile for Your Python/Django App

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Update (October 29, 2019): I updated this post with more recent Django and Postgres versions, to use Python and pip directly in the container (instead of in a separate virtual environment, which was unnecessary), and switched to a non-root user via Docker instead of uWSGI.

Caktus Attends Wagtail CMS Sprint in Reykjavik

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 23:15:00 +0000

Caktus CEO Tobias McNulty and Sales Engineer David Ray recently had the opportunity to attend a development sprint for the Wagtail Content Management System (CMS) in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two-day software development sprint attracted 15 attendees hailing from a total of 5 countries across North America and Europe.

Django is Boring, or Why Tech Startups (Should) Use Django

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:04:32 +0000

I recently attended Django Under The Hood in Amsterdam, an annual gathering of Django core team members and developers from around the world. A common theme discussed at the conference this year is that “Django is boring.” While it’s not the first time this has been discussed, it still struck me as odd. Upon further reflection, however, I see Django’s “boringness” as a huge asset to the community and potential adopters of the framework.

Caktus expands anti-discrimination policies to include sexual orientation, gender identity

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 17:34:32 +0000

For the past few months, we’ve been working on broadening our anti-harassment and equal employment policy. We’re very pleased to announce that our policies now include sexual orientation and gender identity as of March 24, 2016.

Making Clean Code a Part of Your Build Process (And More!)

Sat, 15 Aug 2015 12:00:00 +0000

At Caktus, “clean” (in addition to “working”!) code is an important part of our delivery. For all new projects, we achieve that by using flake8. flake8 is a wrapper around several tools: pep8, pyflakes, and McCabe. pep8 checks to make sure your code matches the PEP 0008 style guidelines, pyflakes looks for a few additional things like unused imports or variables, and McCabe raises warnings about overly complex sections of code.

Using Unsaved Related Models for Sample Data in Django 1.8

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 15:54:33 +0000

Note: In between the time I originally wrote this post and it getting published, a ticket and pull request were opened in Django to remove allow_unsaved_instance_assignment and move validation to the model save() method, which makes much more sense anyways. It's likely this will even be backported to Django 1.8.4. So, if you're using a version of Django that doesn't require this, hopefully you'll never stumble across this post in the first place! If this is still an issue for you, here's the original post:

Creating and Using Open Source: A Guide for ICT4D Managers

Fri, 29 May 2015 18:25:00 +0000

Choosing an open source product or platform upon which to build an ICT4D service is hard. Creating a sustainable, volunteer-driven open source project is even harder. There is a proliferation of open source tools in the world, but the messaging used to describe a given project does not always line up with the underlying technology. For example, the project may make claims about modularity or pluggability that, upon further investigation, prove to be exaggerations at best. Similarly, managers of ICT4D projects may be attracted to Open Source because of the promise of a “free” product, but as we’ve learned through trial and error at Caktus, it’s not always less costly to adapt an existing open source project than it would be to engineer a quality system from the ground up.

PyPy.js: What? How? Why? by Ryan Kelly (PyCon 2015 Must-See Talk: 5/6)

Tue, 26 May 2015 17:21:14 +0000

Part five of six in our PyCon 2015 Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff enjoyed at PyCon.

From Ryan Kelly’s talk I learned that it is actually possible, today, to run Python in a web browser (not something that interprets Python-like syntax and translates it into JavaScript, but an actual Python interpreter!). PyPy.js combines two technologies, PyPy (the Python interpreter written in Python) and Emscripten (an LLVM-to-JavaScript converter, typically used for getting games running in the browser), to run PyPy in the browser. This talk is a must-see for anyone who’s longed before to write client-side Python instead of JavaScript for a web app. While realistically being able to do this in production may still be a ways off, at least in part due to the multiple megabytes of JavaScript one needs to download to get it working, I enjoyed the view Ryan’s talk provided into the internals of this project. PyPy itself is always fascinating, and this talk made it even more so.

Why I Love Technical Blogging

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 16:06:51 +0000

I love writing blog posts, and today I’m setting out to do something I’ve never tried before: write a blog post about writing blog posts. A big part of our mission at Caktus is to foster and help grow the Python and Django development communities, both locally and nationally. Part of how we’ve tried to accomplish this in the past is through hosting development sprints, sponsoring and attending conferences such as PyCon and DjangoCon, and building a knowledge base of common problems in Python and Django development in our blog. Many in the Django community first get to know Caktus through our blog, and it’s both gratifying and humbling when I meet someone at a conference and the person thanks me for a post Caktus wrote that helped him or her solve a technical problem at some point in the past.

Removal of Mural

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 15:12:20 +0000

We have recently heard complaints about the painting over of the mural on the side of 108 Morris, the building we purchased and are restoring in Downtown Durham. I am personally distressed at this response. I see now, in retrospect, where we needed to work harder to discuss our decision with the community. In our enthusiasm to bring more life to Downtown Durham via ground-level retail space and offices for our staff, we were blind to what the public response might be to the mural. Its removal was not a decision taken lightly and one done in consultation with the Historic Preservation Commission. However, we handled this poorly. We apologize for not making more efforts to include the community in this decision.

Caktus Supports Libya Elections with World’s First SMS Voter Registration System

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 17:16:19 +0000

Today’s election in Libya, the second general election for a governing body since Gaddafi’s ouster, is being supported in-country by our Caktus team. Caktus developers created Libya's SMS voter registration system, the first of its kind in the world.

Caktus is going to Montréal for PyCon 2014!

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Caktus is happy to once again sponsoring and attending PyCon in Montreal this year. Year after year, we look forward to this conference and we are always impressed with the quality of the speakers that the conference draws. The team consistently walks away with new ideas from attending the talks, open spaces and working on sprints that they are excited to implement here at Caktus and in their personal projects.

Caktus Implementing New Policy Modeled on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 21:23:59 +0000

Caktus’ successful growth in mobile messaging applications overseas has been a wonderful point of pride for us. The work we’re doing internationally has real impact on burgeoning democracies, HIV/AIDs patients, and others where technology makes all the difference.

Using strace to Debug Stuck Celery Tasks

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 19:56:31 +0000

Celery is a great tool for background task processing in Django. We use it in a lot of the custom web apps we build at Caktus, and it's quickly becoming the standard for all variety of task scheduling work loads, from simple to highly complex.

Central logging in Django with Graylog2 and graypy

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 14:00:12 +0000

Django's logging configuration facilities, which arrived in version 1.3, have greatly eased (and standardized) the process of configuring logging for Django projects. When building complex and interactive web applications at Caktus, we've found that detailed (and properly configured!) logs are key to successful and efficient debugging. Another step in that process — which can be particularly useful in environments where you have multiple web servers — is setting up a centralized logging server to receive all your logs and make them available through an easily accessible web interface. There are a number useful tools to do this, but one we've found that works quite well is Graylog2. Installing and configuring Graylog2 is outside the scope of this post, but there are plenty of tutorials on how to do so accessible through your search engine of choice.

Migrating to a Custom User Model in Django

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 13:10:00 +0000

UPDATE: Read a newer blog post on this topic.

The new custom user model configuration that arrived in Django makes it relatively straightforward to swap in your own model for the Django user model. In most cases, Django's built-in User model works just fine, but there are times when certain limitations (such as the length of the email field) require a custom user model to be installed. If you're starting out with a custom user model, setup and configuration are relatively straightforward, but if you need to migrate an existing legacy project (e.g., one that started out in Django 1.4 or earlier), there are a few gotchas that you might run into. We did this recently for one of our larger, long-term client projects at Caktus, and here's an outline of how we'd recommend tackling this issue:

PBS' Half the Sky Documentary Site Developed by Caktus

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:03:00 +0000

Earlier this year Caktus had the honor of working with Sonnet Media and PBS’ Independent Lens on the documentary, [Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.]{.underline} Originally a best-selling book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the book adapted into a two part documentary series. The documentary gives a voice to oppressed women around the world and brings a greater awareness to their struggles to the rest of the globe. Half the Sky also highlights a few of the amazing women who are directly making a change in their countries by community organizing and advocating for women’s rights through non-governmental organizations.

Planning Our First ShipIt Day at Caktus

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:10:33 +0000

I'm delighted to write that last Friday, we announced we'll be trying our first "ShipIt Day" at Caktus in October. ShipIt Days, also known as FedEx Days, provide a time for the team to set aside what occupies us most days—building fantastic web applications using Python and Django for our wonderful clients—and pick up something new or scratch an itch that's been bugging us for awhile. We got the idea from the book Drive by Daniel Pink, and it was also suggested independently by a number of team members.

Django Fundamentals Bootcamp Recap

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 20:34:03 +0000

On June 8th and 9th, Caktus hosted its first Django Fundamentals Bootcamp. The Caktus team developed the idea for the course, which was a crossword drill application, and has been developing the structure and content of the course over the past year. The bootcamp was designed to teach programmers who have experience in programming with different languages and introduce them to the fundamentals of building a web application with Django. We created an interactive environment where the instructors and students were able to communicate with one another which solved the issue of how to begin developing in an unfamiliar language.

Karen Tracey to Deliver Keynote at DjangoCon Europe 2012

Thu, 31 May 2012 19:47:14 +0000

I am very proud to announce that Karen Tracey, Lead Developer at Caktus and Django Core Developer, will be delivering a keynote address at DjangoCon Europe next week. This will be Karen's first speech to the Django community, of which she has been an exemplary member since 2006.

Narrowing the Gender Gap in the Open Source community

Thu, 24 May 2012 20:44:57 +0000

Diversity is important in a workplace environment. Having different points of view from people with different life experiences brings creative new ideas and innovative solutions to the software development process. As a team of web developers that designs and builds custom web applications, creativity and gender diversity, I would argue, are closely tied and both crucial to the success of our projects.

Using Django and Celery with Amazon SQS

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:26:48 +0000

Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a relatively new offering in the family of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's also an appealing one, because it proposes to quickly and easily replace a common component of the stack in a typical web application, thereby obviating the need to run a separate queue server like RabbitMQ. While RabbitMQ — the typical favorite for Celery users — is not necessarily difficult to install or maintain, removing it from the stack of a web application means one less component that might fail, offloading that service to AWS — especially for applications with a small to moderate queue volume — might prove financially advantageous.

Scraping Data and Web Standards

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

We're currently involved in a project with the UNC School of Journalism that hopes to help rural newspapers in North Carolina leverage OpenBlock. The project is called OpenRural, and if you're a software developer you can find the latest code on GitHub.

Caktus Group Welcomes Designer and Front End Developer Julia Elman

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:52:22 +0000

I'm delighted to announce that Julia Elman has joined our growing team of web developers here at Caktus. Julia started her design career almost 10 years ago in an internal marketing group, and first learned about Django at the SXSW Interactive Festival in 2008. Prior to joining the Caktus team, Julia worked at the Lawrence Journal World (the birthplace of Django) and as a freelance designer.

Testing Web Server Configurations with Fabric and ApacheBench

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:16:33 +0000

Load testing a site with ApacheBench is fairly straight forward. Typically you'd just SSH to a machine on the same network as the one you want to test, and run a command like this:

The Buddha Website Nominated for Webby Award

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:09:44 +0000

I'm delighted to announce that the PBS companion website for The Buddha — a site that Caktus helped build using the Django web framework — has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Religion and Spirituality category! Online voting for the People’s Voice awards is now underway and we would appreciate you voting for the site and encouraging others to do so as well. You can also view the entry page directly here.

New Job Posting: Linux Systems Administrator with Python/Django experience

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:56:33 +0000

I'm delighted to announce that we've just published another job posting for a Linux Systems Administrator at Caktus. The position will involve maintaining existing Linux servers, designing and building highly-scalable deployments, and assistance with Django deployment and development as time permits. This is a full-time position, with benefits, and is based out of our Carrboro, NC office (a short drive from Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill).

Caktus Consulting Group Sponsors PyCon 2011

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:00:00 +0000

PyCon 2011 Atlanta is just around the corner, and I'm proud to announce that Caktus is a gold sponsor at the conference this year! We sponsored DjangoCon in both 2009 and 2010, and this year agreed to extend that support to the Python community in general.

New Careers Page Inaugurated with Django Job Posting

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:50:47 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that we just released a new Careers section of our web site here at Caktus. The section has been inaugurated with a new posting for a full-time Django developer position based out of our Carrboro, NC office (not far from Raleigh, Durham, or Chapel Hill), so kindly check it out and let us know if you or someone you know might be a good fit!

HIV Results, Birth Reminders, and Clinic Communication in Malawi

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 23:52:00 +0000

I recently returned from a 6 week trip in Malawi, where I was heavily involved in the implementation and deployment of Project Mwana, an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) project focused on Maternal and Newborn Child Health (MNCH). The project is currently running as a pilot in both Zambia and Malawi. This post is a fairly technical overview of what the project does and the way in which it was developed.

Simplifying the Testing of Unmanaged Database Models in Django (Updated for Django 4.2 in 2024)

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:01:09 +0000

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September, 2010 and was updated in December, 2024 to incorporate changes in Django and improvements suggested by our readers. It has also been tested for compatibility as of the Django 4.2 release.

Caktus Consulting Group Seeks Two Python/Django Web Developers

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:13:03 +0000

I'm delighted to announce that Caktus is looking for two Python and/or Django web developers to join our team on a contract or part-time basis, with the potential for full-time work in the future.

Caktus Consulting Group Sponsors DjangoCon 2010

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:50:45 +0000

DjangoCon 2010 is just around the corner, and I'm proud to announce that Caktus is sponsoring the conference again this year!

Caktus Consulting Group Welcomes Lead Developer Karen Tracey

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 19:10:43 +0000

I'm delighted to welcome Karey Tracey to our growing team of web developers here at Caktus. Karen is a core developer of the Django web framework and specializes in the development and testing of applications for the web. She is also the author of Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging, published by Packt Publishing in April, 2010.

Expanded services, portfolio, and more in the new Caktus web site

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:46:20 +0000

We're pleased to announce the release of the latest and greatest Caktus web presence yet. This edition features an enhanced services section and portfolio. Among other things, the new site demonstrates how our Django-based content management system can be used to connect related pages in customized, innovative ways.

Caktus Consulting Group hosts 2nd Django sprint in NC Triangle area

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:36:31 +0000

Django is a tool we use every day to build fantastic web apps here at Caktus, and a development sprint is a concerted, focused period of time in which developers meet in the same space to get things done on a project.

Decoupled Django Apps and the Beauty of Generic Relations

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:18:02 +0000

Like just about everyone else, we've written our own suite of tools to help with building complex content management systems in Django here at Caktus. We reviewed a number of the existing CMSes out there, but in almost every case the navigation and page structure were so tightly coupled the system broke down when it came time to add additional, non-CMS pages.

Caktus Sends Team of Five to PyCon 2010 in Atlanta

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:08:30 +0000

Python and Django are tools we use on a daily basis to build fantastic web apps here at Caktus. I'm pleased to announce that Caktus is sending five developers--Colin, Alex, Mike, Mark, and myself--to PyCon 2010! PyCon is an annual gathering for users and developers of the open source Python programming language. This year the US conference is being held in Atlanta, GA. We'll be driving down tomorrow (Thursday) from Chapel Hill, NC and staying for the conference weekend plus one day of the sprints.

Caktus Consulting Group hosts Django sprint in Triangle, NC area

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:37:17 +0000

Django is a tool we use every day to build rock-solid web apps here at Caktus, and a development sprint is a concerted, focused period of time in which developers meet in the same space to get things done on a project.

Open Source Django Projects from Caktus Consulting Group

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:48:44 +0000

At Caktus we're big fans of reusing code. We leverage many open source projects--especially Django apps--to accomplish a variety of tasks. In addition, we've written quite a few pluggable apps over the paste two years that we reuse over and over again for different projects. As a way of giving back to the community, we've polished and released a portion of that code as open source ourselves. While some of the projects have been available on Google Code for awhile now, we just put together a consolidated list of open source Django projects on our web site to serve as a jumping off point for all the projects we like, we contributed to, and we created. Enjoy!

Caktus Consulting Group, LLC sponsors DjangoCon 2009

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:58:29 +0000

Django is a tool we use on a daily basis to build fantastic web apps here at Caktus, and DjangoCon is the annual conference for Django developers and other community members. We are proud to announce that Caktus Consulting Group, LLC is sponsoring DjangoCon 2009!

Creating recursive, symmetrical many-to-many relationships in Django

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:10:43 +0000

In Django, a recursive many-to-many relationship is a ManyToManyField that points to the same model in which it's defined ('self'). A symmetrical relationship is one in where, when a.contacts = [b], a is in b.contacts.

Towards a Standard for Django Session Messages

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:31:13 +0000

Django needs a standard way in which session-specific messages can be created and retrieved for display to the user. For years we’ve been surviving using user.message_set to store messages that are really specific to the current session, not the user, or using the latest and greatest Django snippet, pluggable app, or custom crafted middleware to handle messages in a more appropriate way.

Remote logging with Python logging and Django

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:47:10 +0000

As part of my work on EveryWatt, our fledgling energy monitoring web site, I needed a way to consolidate log messages from all the data loggers we have running in a single place. If you're not familiar with it, Python's logging module is good stuff and worth checking out. We already used it for logging to files locally, and the module defines an HTTPHandler that can deliver log messages to a remote server via HTTP.

Testing Django Views for Concurrency Issues (Updated for Django 4.2 in 2024)

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:59:25 +0000

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May, 2009 and was updated in December, 2024 to incorporate changes in Django and improvements suggested by our readers. It has also been tested for compatibility as of the Django 4.2 release.

Parsing Microseconds in a Django Form

Tue, 26 May 2009 13:43:56 +0000

There's currently no way to accept microsecond-precision input through a Django form's DateTimeField. This is an acknowledged bug, but the official solution might not come very soon, because the real fix is non-trivial.

Seamlessly switch off (and on) a Django (or other WSGI) site for upgrades

Mon, 25 May 2009 19:53:18 +0000

In preparation for migrating the EveryWatt database from one machine to another, I wrote this little WSGI script to easily disable the site while I copy the data. Since it doesn't depend on Django or really anything else (other than a functioning WSGI server), you can use it for other upgrades, too.

Eclipse Ganymede and Subclipse on Ubuntu - JavaHL (JNI) not available

Thu, 21 May 2009 15:10:25 +0000

I finally got around to updating my Eclipse, PyDev, and Subclipse environment today, which I use for Django development.

Formerly I was using the SvnKit (pure-Java) libraries. SvnKit "felt" slow to me, compared to my command line SVN client, so this time I tried to get the JavaHL (JNI) libraries working.

Downsizing an LVM/RAID root partition

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:04:03 +0000

At Caktus we use LVM2 on a RAID1 device to ease disk management on a number of our servers. Recently I needed to downsize the root partition of one of the servers, so I rebooted onto an Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD and attempted to load the RAID/LVM info.

Migrating from django-photologue 1.x to 2.x

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:52:30 +0000

We're in the process of updating a web app for a client that was built last year about this time using Django and Photologue. Needless to say, there have been a lot of changes to both over the past year!

Solving NFS issues on embedded machines

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:07:27 +0000

As part of my work on EveryWatt, I setup an NFS-based development environment for one of the data loggers we use for energy monitoring in the Caktus office. The stock 2.4 Linux kernel in the machine seemed to have some trouble mounting the file system root I had exported from one of our servers. The symptoms included long delays for most if not all activities that used the file system and lots of messages like these in dmesg:

Why Caktus Uses Django

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:45:31 +0000

Here at Caktus, we use the popular Django web framework for a lot of our custom web application development. We don't use Django simply because it's popular, easy to learn, or happened to be the first thing we found. We've written web apps in PHP, Java, and Ruby on Rails--all before we discovered Django--but were never quite satisfied. Following are just a few of the reasons that we both enjoy working with Django and believe it gives you (the client) the best end-product.

Entering Contacts in CiviCRM

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:29:51 +0000

One of our non-profit clients recently asked for help entering the numerous business cards they get at trade shows, etc., into their Customer Relationship Management database, a copy of CiviCRM that we setup and manage for them. The best path for entering contacts isn't necessarily obvious from the get-go, but the following procedure is the best we've found and has the lowest up-front investment (you might be able to do something more efficient with a Profile, but that doesn't seem as flexible with respect to matching existing contacts).

Caktus' New Web Presence

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:11:22 +0000

In honor of our recent one year anniversary (August 31st), we revamped our web presence to address a couple concerns about the original site:

Free and Open Source security scanning software

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:45:23 +0000

I was pretty disappointed when I discovered today that Nessus, the security scanner I've used for many years now, had discontinued its free plugin feed. The plugin feed is used to disseminate updated security alerts in an automated fashion to the security scanner, as they become available. The price tag on Nessus' new "Professional Feed": $1200.

Is Asterisk More Silent Than You'd Like?

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:06:01 +0000

At Caktus, we use the Asterisk open source telephony platform. While setting up Asterisk, we tested a number of different system environments and configurations to help determine what would best fit our telephone needs. This involved running Asterisk on both real and virtual machines and testing several configuration front ends, including FreePBX and DeStar. This article discusses a fairly technical problem we confronted while installing a basic Asterisk setup on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system (on real hardware); namely, when the ztdummy Linux kernel module was loaded, Asterisk was unable to play back any recordings (even its own). When we unloaded the ztdummy module, however, recordings would play back fine. The catch, of course, was that we needed ztdummy loaded for conference room support.