Caktus Blog

Wagtail is a fantastic content management system that does a great job of making it easy for developers to get a new website up and running quickly and painlessly. It’s no wonder that Wagtail has grown to become the leading Django-based CMS. As one of the creators of Wagtail recently said, it makes the initial experience of getting a website set up and running very good. At Caktus, Wagtail is our go-to framework when we need a content management system.

These days it’s easy to get swept up into the buzz around Python’s strengths as a data science package, but Python is also great for the more mundane, business process side of computing. One of the most important business processes is generating reports, and the most used and venerable form of report is the PDF. Python has a great library for generating and manipulating PDFs: ReportLab. I recently read more about this extremely useful library in ReportLab: PDF Processing with Python, by Michael Driscoll. With a few caveats, it’s an excellent resource.

ElixirConf 2019 will be in Aurora, CO, and I’m delighted to announce that two Cakti, our CEO Tobias McNulty and Lead Developer Vinod Kurup, will be in attendance from August 27 - 30.

We’re looking forward to the international gathering at DjangoCon 2019, in San Diego, CA. The six-day conference, from September 22 - 27, is focused on the Django web framework, and we’re proud to attend as sponsors for the tenth year! We’re also hosting the second annual Caktus Mini Golf event.

Pandas is a powerful Python data analysis tool. It's used heavily in the data science community since its data structures make real-world data analysis significantly easier. At Caktus, in addition to using it for data exploration, we also incorporate it into Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes.

It’s no secret that Caktus ❤️’s Wagtail, our favorite Django-based CMS. On July 25, I had the pleasure of attending Wagtail Space US, an annual convening and celebration of all things Wagtail at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. After a couple days of talks, workshops, and sprints, we’re even more excited by what Wagtail can offer us and our clients.

I enjoyed working through the book Creating GUI Applications with wxPython by Michael Driscoll, learning various techniques for programming GUI applications in Python using wxPython.

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.

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.