Caktus Blog

I recently attended All Things Open in Raleigh. Bringing together more than 4,000 attendees, it is the largest open tech event on the East Coast, and is focused on “exploring open source, open tech, and the open web.” This year, ATO included more than 240 sessions across 22 tracks, ranging from front-end development to internet-of-things to studies of open data in government. The event was much larger than the last time that I attended in 2017.

I recently completed a three-month internship with Caktus Group. This is a major accomplishment for me because two years ago, to the day, I was working as a consultant in the education services industry. I was inspired to pursue a career in web development after I came across a six-month course teaching full-stack Javascript. In sharing my experience, I hope to shed light on what it’s like working as an intern at Caktus, and give professionals looking to transition into web development some advice that may be useful once they land an entry-level position. In general, my experience felt a little like this:

Above: Django Fellow Carlton Gibson gives a talk on “Your Web Framework Needs You: An Update.”

Again this year, DjangoCon more than delivered on its promise of something for everyone. A keynote on burnout and balance? Thoroughly entertaining! Jessica Rose’s talk left us in stitches. Who knew a talk about occupational burnout could be so fun? It was one of a wide range of subjects covered in three days of talks, bookended by a day of tutorials and two days of sprints. The conference took place in San Diego and ran from September 22 - 26. What a great week of learning and networking!

We are pleased to continue serving the North Carolina community at-large through our semi-annual Charitable Giving Program. Twice a year we solicit proposals from our team to contribute to a variety of non-profit organizations. With this program, we look to support groups in which Cakti are involved or that have impacted their lives in some way. This gives Caktus a chance to support our own employees as well as the wider community. For the first half of 2019 we are pleased to support the following charities:

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.