Tobias McNulty

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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).

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.

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!

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.