Caktus Blog

Growth for Durham has meant a lot of great things for Caktus, from an expanding pool of tech talent to an increased interest in civic-minded tech solutions to shape the evolving community. This growth has also brought logistical challenges. Most recently, this meant providing adequate commuter support to our employees in a city whose transportation infrastructure is still nascent.

Caktus turned ten this year and we recently celebrated with a party at our office in Durham, NC. We wouldn’t be where we are today without our employees, clients, family, and friends, so this wasn’t just a celebration of Caktus. It was a celebration of the relationships the company is built on.

In the day-to-day work of building new software and maintaining old software, we can easily lose sight of the bigger picture. I think we can find perspective when we step back and walk through the evolution of a single piece of software.

In May 2017, Atlassian rolled out the new Atlassian ID feature, which gives Atlassian product users a central Atlassian account that holds their user details. When this change occurred, our integration with G Suite combined with the Atlassian ID feature to result in some users with strange display names in JIRA, which I (as the JIRA admin) can’t fix since users now control their own profile. However, they don’t control their profile through JIRA. So, how does one change the names that display in JIRA for their users? (Hint: you can’t do it through User Management.)

Looking for some pointers to improve my own client management skills, I scoured the internet to find practical ideas on how to handle challenges better as the product owner (PO) in a client-services organization. I came up completely short.

Advanced Django File Handling

Modern Django's file handling capabilities go well beyond what's covered in the tutorial. By customizing the handlers that Django uses, you can do things pretty much any way you want.

Mid-August brought travel to Spokane for several Caktus staff members attending DjangoCon 2017. As a Django shop, we were proud to sponsor and attend the event for the eighth year.

At Caktus, each team works on multiple client-service projects at once, and it’s sometimes challenging to adapt different clients’ various tools and workflows into a single Scrum team’s process.

Caktus recently held the Q3 2017 ShipIt Day. Each quarter, employees take a step back from business as usual and take advantage of time to work on personal projects or otherwise develop skills. This quarter, we enjoyed fresh crêpes while working on a variety of projects, from coloring books to Alexa skills.

Early in your transition to Scrum, you will be faced with a hard truth: your team or organization has job titles and Scrum has roles, and there is probably little to no overlap between the two. How do you map Susan, lead technical architect, and Tom, project manager, to the three Scrum roles: product owner, Scrum master, and developer?