Caktus Blog

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 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.

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.

The Journal of Medical Internet Research recently published “Epic Allies: Development of a Gaming App to Improve Antiretroviral Therapy Adherence Among Young HIV-Positive Men Who Have Sex With Men”. Epic Allies, initially funded by a federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, represents a partnership between Caktus, UNC’s Institute of Global Health and Infection Diseases, and Duke Global Health Institute.

PyCon, beyond being the best community event for Python developers, is also an event that we happily began thinking about eleven months ago. Almost as soon as PyCon 2015 ended, we had the good fortune of planning the look and feel of PyCon 2016 with organizer extraordinaires Ewa Jodlowska, Diana Clark, and new this year, Brandon Rhodes. Our team has loved working with the organizers on the PyCon websites for the past three years now. They’re great people who always prioritize the needs of PyCon attendees, whether that’s babysitting services or a smooth PyCon web experience.

The environment at Caktus is, above all, one of encouragement. I experienced that encouragement as an intern and continue to experience it as a full-time developer. In addition to providing workplace mentorship, Caktus encourages all of its employees to submit talks to conferences. My manager Mark Lavin and mentor Karen Tracy encouraged me to get over my concerns about being new to the field and to start submitting talks.

Code for Durham recently participated in Code for America’s National Day of Civic Hacking. Hosted in the Caktus Group Tech Space, the event was attended by more than 50 local participants.

Below you can find this month’s roundup of articles and posts shared by Cakti that drew the most attention on Twitter. The list covers coding for matrix factorization algorithms in Python, designing apps that optimize for sequential dual screen usage, preventing technical debt, and understanding the complexities and limitations involved in building apps for low-income American families.

This Saturday, June 4th, Caktus Group will be hosting Code for Durham as they join Code for America’s National Day of Civic Hacking. The day is a chance for everyone from developers, to government employees, to residents who care about their city to come together and use their talents to help the community. Attendees will collaborate on civic tech projects to be used by citizens and government employees. These projects seek to provide data on or improve government processes, addressing issues like health care, affordable housing, criminal record access, police data, and more.

As Django developers, we always look forward to PyCon. This year, working with the Python Software Foundation on the design for PyCon 2016’s site kindled our enthusiasm early. Our team is so excited for all the fun to begin. With an array of fantastic events, speakers, and workshops, we thought we would highlight all the events we’ll be participating in. Come find us!