Caktus Blog

Above: A view of the busy exhibit hall. Photo copyright © 2019 by Sean Harrison. All rights reserved.

PyCon 2019 attracted 3,393 attendees, including a group of six Cakti. When we weren’t networking with attendees at our booth, we attended some fascinating presentations. Below are some of our favorites. You can watch these talks and more on the PyCon 2019 YouTube channel.

Pictured: I traveled to Cleveland, OH, for PyCon 2019, where I got this shot of the city skyline.

This year I attended PyCon for the first time. It’s rather amazing that I haven’t been before, since I’ve been using Python professionally for over 15 years. PyCon 2019 was held in Cleveland from May 1–9. There was so much to take in, and there are so many good things to say about it. It was a fantastic experience. But rather than provide a “mission report: 2019” a la Winter Soldier, I thought I’d do something more useful — write a guide to PyCon from a newbie perspective. Here are six lessons I learned from my first PyCon.

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?

Pictured: Scott, Kat, and Tim take a quick break for a game of cards.

It may be no surprise that there are gamers among our Caktus crew, but you may be surprised by the type of games that Cakti play. From the ancient art of Mahjong to the modern fun of Pokemon, our team members cover it all.

Pictured: The final rush is on! Staff quickly check materials for our PyCon booth.

PyCon 2019 is almost here, and we’re excited to continue to sponsor this premier Python event, which takes place in Cleveland, OH, from May 1 - 9. PyCon attracts attendees from around the world, and for the first time, the conference will include a track of Spanish talks.

Caktus Changing from Django to New COBOL-based Framework

Beginning immediately, Caktus will build new projects using our new COBOL-based framework, ADD COBOL TO WEB.

In this post, I review some reasons why it's really difficult to program correctly when using times, dates, time zones, and daylight saving time, and then I'll give some advice for working with them in Python and Django. Also, I'll go over why I hate daylight saving time (DST).

New clients regularly ask us if we build WordPress sites. When we dig deeper, we generally learn that they’re looking for a user-friendly content management system (CMS) that will allow them to effortlessly publish and curate their site content. As we’ve written about previously, WordPress can be a good fit for simple sites. However, the majority of our clients need a more robust technical solution with customizable content management tools. For the Python-driven web applications that we develop, we love to work with Wagtail.

Pictured: Our library of reference books at Caktus cover topics including Django and Python, as well as project management and Agile methodologies.

We have a small two-person Infrastructure Ops team here at Caktus (including myself) so I was excited to go to my first devopsdays Charlotte and be surrounded by Ops people. The event was held just outside of Charlotte, at the Red Ventures auditorium in Indian Land, South Carolina. About 200 people gathered there for two days of talks and open sessions. Devopsdays are held multiple times a year, in various locations around the world. Check out their schedule to see if there will be an event near you.