Caktus Blog
2016

Bake the Cookies (PyCon 2016 Must-See Talk: 5/6)
Part five of six in our annual PyCon Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. With so many fantastic talks, it’s hard to know where to start, so here’s our short list.

Trainspotting: Real-Time Detection (PyCon 2016 Must-See Talk: 4/6)
Part four of six in our annual PyCon Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. With so many fantastic talks, it’s hard to know where to start, so here’s our short list.

How I Built a Power Debugger (PyCon 2016 Must-See Talk: 3/6)
Part three of six in our annual PyCon Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. With so many fantastic talks, it’s hard to know where to start, so here’s our short list.

ShipIt Day Recap - July 2016
We finished up last week with another successful ShipIt Day. ShipIt Days are quarterly events where we put down client work for a little bit and focus on learning, stretching ourselves, and sharing. Everyone chooses to work together or individually on an itch or a project that has been on the back of their mind for the last few months. This time, we stretched ourselves by trying out new frameworks, languages, and pluggable apps. Here are some of the projects we worked on during ShipIt Day:

What We’re Clicking - July Link Roundup
Here’s external links our team’s been chatting about and sharing on social media since the last roundup.
Web Service Efficiency at Instagram with Python (Instagram)
“Instagram currently features the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework, which is written entirely in Python. We initially chose to use Python because of its reputation for simplicity and practicality, which aligns well with our philosophy of ‘do the simple thing first.’”

Caktus at DjangoCon 2016 - Talks that Have Us Talking
Caktus is headed to Philadelphia for our seventh DjangoCon. We’re Gold Sponsors this year, so definitely come by our booth to chat with our team and grab t-shirts, stickers, and a 40% off coupon for Lightweight Django, co-written by our technical director, Mark Lavin. Also be sure to enter our raffle for an Amazon Echo.

Better Testing With Less Code (PyCon 2016 Must-See Talk: 2/6)
Part two of six in our annual PyCon Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. With so many fantastic talks, it’s hard to know where to start, so here’s our short list.

From Developer to Manager by Sean O'Connor (PyCon 2016 Must-See Talk: 1/6)
Part one of six in our annual PyCon Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. With so many fantastic talks, it’s hard to know where to start, so here’s our short list.
Caktus Endorses Principles for Digital Development
Caktus is proud to announce that we endorse the Principles for Digital Development or “Digital Principles”, a set of best practices that support technology creation for international development. We feel strongly that they help technology companies like us improve our contributions to the Information and Communications Tool for Development (ICT4D) community. In offering technical design and software development services, we often work alongside our clients to help shape the tools they need. Because of our influence in this process, having established principles are helpful to use as a guide in our conversations and design of the tools we build.

Query Expressions are Amazing
The Django 1.8 release added support for complex query expressions. The documentation has some nice examples but they don't do justice to how crazy awesome these are. In this post, we will go through some additional examples of how to leverage these expressions.