Caktus Blog

Have you ever created a filter in JIRA full of project names and returned to edit it, only to find all the project names replaced by five-digit numbers with no context? The trial and error approach (deleting and restoring numbers one by one until the project you wanted to remove no longer appears in the filter results) is painful. So, how do you find the ID for a project?

Unit testing is something that deeply divides programmer communities. Nearly everyone agrees that it’s good to have unit tests in place, but some developers question whether the time invested in writing unit tests would be better spent writing “real” code, doing manual QA, or debugging.

With 2017 now over, we highlight the top 17 posts published or updated on the Caktus blog this year. Have you read them all?

I attended the Southern Fried Agile conference in November 2017, where I heard some excellent talks and connected with local Agilists in Charlotte, NC. Southern Fried Agile is the sister conference of TriAgile, which I also attended this year.

Twice a year we solicit proposals from the team for contributions to non-profit organizations in which individual Cakti are involved or that have impacted their lives. Our charitable giving program is a chance to support not only our own employees but the wider community. This quarter we are pleased to donate to the following organizations.

Here at Caktus the front-end team stays on the bleeding edge by taking advantage of the latest and greatest tools. We only incorporate features into our packaging that are well-supported and production-ready, as well as those that meet our list of standard browser requirements. Luckily, there are plenty of tools that allow us to use experimental technologies with appropriate fallbacks for non-supported browsers.

The Caktus team attends a number of conferences each year to learn about the latest tips and tools. Several of us also go to events to share knowledge as speakers or sprint leaders. Using our varied experiences, we’ve put together a list of the events we’re looking forward to next year.

As a certified Amazon Web Services (AWS) Consulting Partner, Caktus sent a member of the team to AWS re:invent this year to meet other solution providers, discuss with AWS representatives how to leverage our partnership to best serve our clients, and of course, get hands-on experience with both existing and newly-revealed AWS services.

Did you know Django 2.0 is out? The development team at Caktus knows and we’re excited! You should be excited too if you work with or depend on Django. Here’s what our Cakti have been saying about the recently-released 2.0 beta.

Before an app can be built, the development team needs to know what they are supposed to be building. How do they establish that? With requirements gathering.