Tobias McNulty

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 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’ 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.