Tobias McNulty

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.

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.