Caktus Blog

Businesses and organizations come to Caktus to build custom web applications that will help solve their users’ problems. Before contacting us, clients spend time and effort thinking through their users’ problems. But in doing so they do not always talk directly to potential users of the application. As a result, they come up with ideas for the application based on who they think the target users are rather than who they know those users are. Or, if they have correctly identified their target user segment, they may make assumptions about the ways users think, behave, or accomplish tasks.

March 2018 marked the end of my fourth year as a Scrum master. I began with a Certified ScrumMaster workshop in 2014 and haven’t stopped learning since. I keep a running list titled “Lessons Learned,” where I jot down thoughts I find significant as they occur to me so that I can go back to the list and draw from my little bank of personal wisdom.

We’re one month away from PyCon 2018 and are looking forward to this year’s event in Cleveland, OH. Caktus is proud to sponsor once again and will be in attendance with a booth.

In Agile development, a stakeholder is anyone outside the development team with a stake in the success of the project. If you are a stakeholder, knowledge of Agile will help you understand how the project will be developed and managed, when you can expect to see progress, and what the team needs from you in order to deliver their best work. Understanding these basic concepts and what your role entails are essential to your project’s success.

Another quarter, another ShipIt Day! Take a look at what our team dove into in the first part of 2018.

Git conflicts tell us when changes don’t go together. While working with other developers, or even when working more than one branch by yourself, changes to the same code can happen. Trying to merge them together will stop Git in its tracks.

A crucial but often overlooked aspect of software development is quality assurance (QA). If you have an app in progress, you will likely hear this term throughout the development life cycle. It may seem that coding is the brunt of the development work, since without code your app doesn’t exist, but quality assurance efforts often consist of up to 50% of the total project effort (1) (and part of the QA effort is coding). Without quality assurance, your app may exist but it is unlikely it will function well, meet the objectives of your users, or be maintainable in the future. QA is important, but what exactly is it?

Sprint reviews for teams working with multiple clients and managing multiple projects can be a challenge. At Caktus, we combine more traditional sprint review guidelines with some tweaks to fit our company and client’s needs.

What Is Django Rest Framework?

Django Rest Framework (DRF) is a library which works with standard Django models to build a flexible and powerful API for your project.

How do your users interact with your web app? Do you have users who are requesting new features? Are there more good feature requests than you have developer hours to build? Often, a small addition to your app can open the door to let users build features they want (within limits) without using more of your own developers’ time, and you can still keep control over how data can be accessed or changed. That small addition is called an application programming interface, or API. APIs are used across the web, but if you aren’t a developer, you may not have heard of them. They can be easily built on top of Django projects, though, and can provide great value to your own developers as well as to your users.