Caktus Blog

This year marks 10 years of building sharp web apps at Caktus Group. We’re honored by the trust our clients have put in us; it has enabled Caktus to grow from a team of 3 Python developers to an organization of 31 people and supported our efforts to give back to the local and open source communities.

In January of 2016, Caktus transitioned from a general Agile development environment to a more focused Scrum environment. Part of this transition entailed moving from a targeted budget allocation approach per project, to a self-organizing, goal-based team structure with no obvious provision for tight, consistent control over project budgets.

Once per quarter, Caktus employees have the opportunity to take a day away from client work to focus on learning or refreshing skills, testing out ideas, or working on open source contributions. The Q2 2017 ShipIt Day work included building apps, updating open source projects, trying out new tools, and more. Keep reading for the details.

Building custom tags for Django templates has gotten much easier over the years, with decorators provided that do most of the work when building common, simple kinds of tags.

It’s almost time for PyCon and the team here at Caktus is ready to meet other attendees. Where and how can you find us?

When I first became a digital project manager (DPM), I struggled to find relevant resources. A ton of information was available on traditional project management, but not much specifically on digital project management. Eventually, I connected with another DPM in my organization and we quickly became friends and confidants. She opened my eyes to the Digital PM Summit, a new conference targeted at DPMs, which was ultimately the inspiration for my new Meetup group.

In the first installment of this two-part series, I introduced product discovery as the process of building a shared understanding about the product between stakeholders and the product team, which helps you make better decisions about what to build. I also suggested that we look at product discovery as a four-step process:

When setting out to build a new website or web application, it is a good idea to build a shared understanding of the product between stakeholders and the product team. Through research and collaborative activities that aim to answer questions about the product, its goals, and its users’ needs, the stakeholders and product team discover the full breadth and depth of the application to be built, as well as contexts and implications that need to be considered for the product to be successful. We call this process product discovery.

I ask a lot of questions as a developer. Some of them have been more basic, like ‘How do I import a Python function from one file into another?’, and some more complex, like ‘How should we take an API request and return a dynamically-generated PDF as a response?’

Digging Into Django QuerySets

Object-relational mappers (or ORMs for short), such as the one that comes built-in with Django, make it easy for even new developers to become productive without needing to have a large body of knowledge about how to make use of relational databases. They abstract away the details of database access, replacing tables with declarative model classes and queries with chains of method calls. Since this is all done in standard Python developers can build on top of it further, adding instance methods to a model to wrap reusable pieces of logic. However, the abstraction provided by ORMs is not perfect. There are pitfalls lurking for unwary developers, such as the N + 1 problem. On the bright side, it is not difficult to explore and gain a better understanding of Django's ORM. Taking the time and effort to do so will help you become a better Django developer.