Caktus Blog

Last Friday, the Cakti set aside regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day was all about open source contributions, frontend fixes, and learning new (or revisiting old) programming languages. Read about the various ShipIt Day projects for Q2 of 2016 below.

A few weeks ago, Rebecca Conley attended DjangoCon Europe 2016 in Budapest, Hungary. The event is a five-day conference that brings together Django lovers from all over the world to learn about and share each other’s experiences with Django.

Caktus began the process of adopting Scrum mid-November 2015 with two days of onsite Scrum training and fully transitioned to a Scrum environment in January 2016. From our original epiphany of “Yes! We want Scrum!” to the beginning of our first sprint, it took us six weeks to design and execute a process and transition plan. This is how we did it:

We’re starting a new, monthly series on the Caktus blog highlighting the articles and posts shared by Cakti that drew the most attention on Twitter. These roundups will include everything from Django how-tos to explorations of the tech industry, to innovations for social good.

For the past few months, we’ve been working on broadening our anti-harassment and equal employment policy. We’re very pleased to announce that our policies now include sexual orientation and gender identity as of March 24, 2016.

For the past couple months, we’ve been working on a new white paper, “Shipping Faster: Django Team Improvements”. We examined our existing processes, looked at best practices, and considered what has or hasn’t worked across our dozens of simultaneous projects.

We’re proud to report that Lightweight Django (O’Reilly Media) is now available in Portuguese as Django Essencial. The book was written by our technical director Mark Lavin and Caktus alumnus Julia Elman to great reviews. Django Essencial comes just in time for Mark’s keynote talk during PyCon Nordeste.

When building a translated application, it's important to test that all of the text is going to be translated, but difficult to tell until the translation has been done. Until then, even when you switch languages you still see English everywhere. It's not until all the text that's been set up to be translated actually is that you can see the site in the other language, at which point the English messages stick out like a sore thumb. But that's usually very late in the process. How can we catch those errors earlier?

What is it like to be an intern at Caktus? I am finishing up as the spring Django intern (though I didn’t actually use any Django), so I’ll share my experience.

Our love for Python is no secret. But with so many modules, tools, and libraries, it can be overwhelming for beginning developers to identify the most useful. Obviously, our favorite framework is Django. But we’re setting aside our undying love for that framework for a moment to offer a list of other helpful Python libraries. From those offering standard solutions to everyday programming problems, to ones that hold a special place in the heart of the dev who created them, these are some of our developer’s favorite tools for Python development.