Caktus Blog

Our internship program sustains Caktus’ growth, challenges and reinvigorates our development practices, builds our relations with the local tech and wider Django communities, and hones our operational practices as a company. This post shares our guiding principles for how we structure our developer internship to achieve these goals, while providing a meaningful and edifying experience for the interns we hire.

In researching outsourced web development, you may have come across a few different ways to get your project built and have some questions as a result. How well defined do the project requirements need to be prior to starting development? Will Waterfall or Agile methods deliver the best results? Should you look for a consultancy offering team augmentation or in-house Agile-based work? What are the ramifications for your project of picking one or the other?

Our quarterly ShipIt Day has come and gone, with many new ideas and experiments from the team. As we do every quarter, Caktus staff stepped away from client work to try new technology, read up on the latest documentation, update internal processes, or otherwise find inspiring ways to improve themselves and Caktus as a whole. Keep reading to see what we worked on.

Have you ever heard anyone sing opera during a tech-focused conference? Neither had I, until now.

Red Hat Agile Day, held in downtown Raleigh, recently provided this unique opportunity. The theme of the 2017 Red Hat Agile Day was “Agile: brokering innovation; bringing together great ideas.” The conference certainly lived up to that theme with a diverse line-up of speakers, including a former professional opera singer who bookended his presentation with songs. One was a creative, original ballad about being an Agile product manager (see the lyrics here), which he delivered at full blast, because how else can you sing opera?

What White Space Is

In the context of web design, white space (or negative space) is the space around and between elements on a page. To non-designers, it may seem unnecessary or an expression of a particular aesthetic (and therefore non-essential to a web page). To designers, it is an essential tool to increase the comprehension of a composition and guide a viewer’s attention and focus.

Fixed headers are a common design pattern that keeps navigation essentials in easy reach as users meander down a page. Keeping a header fixed as the user scrolls can free up horizontal space for smaller devices by avoiding sidebars, and keeps your branding visible.

Dokku is a great little tool. It lets you set up your own virtual machine (VM) to facilitate quick and easy Heroku-like deployments through a git push command. Builds are fast, and updating environment variables is easy. The problem is that Dokku includes all of your services on a single instance. When you run your database on the Dokku instance, you risk losing it (and any data that's not yet backed up) should your VM suddenly fail.

Designing navigation that will support the needs of website users is one of the more important aspects of site usability. At Caktus we practice iterative, user-centered navigation design, which includes user feedback.

Client feedback is integral to the success of a project and as a product owner, obtaining it is part of your responsibility. Good feedback is not synonymous with positive or negative feedback. A client should feel empowered and comfortable enough to speak up when something isn’t right. If they wait to share their honest thoughts, there is a high chance it will cost more time and money to fix down the road.

Go to any major city and you will be able to find a user group for just about every major, modern programming language. Developers meet in their off hours to discuss what’s new in their language of choice, challenges they’ve encountered, and different ways of doing things. If you’ve never been to one of these groups, it might be easy to brush them off as an unimportant outlet where people talk in way too much detail about a geeky interest. Instead, most of the attendees are professionals who are looking to build skills and find new ways to solve problems.