Caktus Blog
2017

From User Story Mapping to High-Level Release Plan
At Caktus, we begin many projects with a discovery workshop. A discovery workshop is an opportunity for our product team to get together with client stakeholders in order to answer three questions:

Is Django the Right Fit for your Project?
You need a website. You may have done some searches, and come back overwhelmed and empty-handed, having found hosting providers offering services that may have sounded familiar (“WordPress”) and ones that may have sounded like a foreign language (“cPanel”). You may have considered hiring someone to build your website, and gotten conflicting answers about what you need and what it would cost. You may have also heard about Django, but you’re not sure how it it fits into the picture and whether or not it’s the right fit for your project. This is common, because there are many different types of websites out there. To help answer the question of whether Django is the right fit for your project, let’s take a look at the landscape.

Upgrading from Wagtail 1.0 to Wagtail 1.11
There are plenty of reasons to upgrade your Wagtail site. Before we look at how to do it, let’s take a look at a few of those reasons.

Caktus at DjangoCon2017
In less than a month we’ll be heading out to Spokane, WA for DjangoCon 2017. We’re proud to be attending as sponsors for the eighth year, and look forward to greeting everyone at our booth. On August 16th, we’ll be raffling off a GoPro Session action camera, so be sure to stop by and enter. We’ll also have our comfy new t-shirts and some limited-edition Caktus 10th Anniversary water bottles to give away. They went fast at PyCon, so don’t wait to get yours.

Constructive Code Review (Bonus PyCon 2017 Must-See Talk)
There were so many good talks this year that we’re including a bonus entry in the 2017 edition of our annual PyCon Must-See Series, highlighting the talks our staff especially loved at PyCon.

Readability Counts (PyCon 2017 Must-See Talk 6/6)
Part 6 in the 2017 edition of our annual PyCon Must-See Series, highlighting the talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. While there were many great talks, this is our team’s shortlist.

Python Tool Review: Using PyCharm for Python Development - and More
Back in 2011, I wrote a blog post on using Eclipse for Python Development.
I've never updated that post, and it's probably terribly outdated by now. But there's a good reason for that - I haven't used Eclipse in years. Not long after that post, I came across PyCharm, and I haven't really looked back.

Requests, Under the Hood (PyCon 2017 Must-See Talk 5/6)
Part five of six in the 2017 edition of our annual PyCon Must-See Series, highlighting the talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. While there were many great talks, this is our team’s shortlist.

Managing your AWS Container Infrastructure with Python
We deploy Python/Django apps to a wide variety of hosting providers at Caktus. Our django-project-template includes a Salt configuration to set up an Ubuntu virtual machine on just about any hosting provider, from scratch. We've also modified this a number of times for local hosting requirements when our customer required the application we built to be hosted on hardware they control. In the past, we also built our own tool for creating and managing EC2 instances automatically via the Amazon Web Services (AWS) APIs. In March, my colleague Dan Poirier wrote an excellent post about deploying Django applications to Elastic Beanstalk demonstrating how we’ve used that service.

5 Ways to Deploy Your Python Web App in 2017 (PyCon 2017 Must-See Talk 4/6)
Part four of six in the 2017 edition of our annual PyCon Must-See Series, highlighting the talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. While there were many great talks, this is our team’s shortlist.