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 saw everything from cat animations to improvements on our Taylor Swift lyric generator app. Read about the various ShipIt Day projects for Q1 of 2016 below.

Republished with permission from ICTWorks.org

At the recent MERL Tech conference, Tania Lee (Caktus Group), Tom Walker (Engine Room), Laura Walker McDonald (SIMLab), and Lynnae Day (Oxfam America) led a session called, “The Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs of Choosing an M&E Platform.” They’ve written up their reflections and learning from that session focusing on project design, tool design/research, and getting things off the ground, whether that means finding external help or building a custom solution.

Hierarchical data are everywhere, from product catalogs to blog post comments. A classic example is the tree of life, where kingdoms are subdivided into a hierarchy of phylum and class down to genus and species. What if you wish to store this data in a database table, which is inherently flat? Databases do not natively store hierarchies, so you need to work around that.

This year we had the pleasure of building a number of unique solutions for several organizations. In addition, we had the support of these clients to open source the tools we built. By open sourcing our work, we enable others to use, replicate, and even improve upon the tools we’ve created.

My name is Ben Phillips and I am Caktus’ Open Source Fellow. As my fellowship comes to a close, I wanted to reflect on my time at Caktus and to share my experience and some of what I’ve learned here. First, however, I should probably share how I ended up here in the first place.

This year, our neighbors at American Tobacco Campus (ATC) hosted Durham’s first ever Tree of Bikes event to help collect and distribute new bikes to children in need in the local community. The tree is a 25-foot tall sculpture made entirely of new children’s bicycles donated by individuals and local businesses in the Triangle. The bikes are then distributed to children living in the Cornwallis Road affordable housing community managed by the Durham Housing Authority.

Today, at Caktus headquarters, CTO and co-founder of Caktus Colin Copeland will stand at a press conference along with activists, police representatives, and elected officials to announce the launch of OpenDataPolicingNC.com. The first site of its kind, OpenDataPolicingNC.com draws on public records to publish up-to-date stop, search, and use-of-force data—broken down by race and ethnicity—for every police department and officer in the state of North Carolina. The volunteer effort, led by The Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) and technical leadership by Colin, includes approximately 20 million anonymized data points from 15 years of NC traffic stop data.

Are you looking for a good gift for a current or future Django developer? Check out Caktus technical director Mark Lavin’s work for O’Reilly:

Cross-posted with Creative Associates International. Written by Gina Assaf (Creative Associates International) and Tania Lee (Caktus Group). Image courtesy of Creative Associates International.

I’ve struggled to find an ideal way to load initial data for Django projects. By “initial data,” I’m referring to the kind of data that you need on a new system for it to be functional, but could change later. These are largely lists of possible choices, such as time zones, countries, or crayon colors.