Caktus Blog
2015

Cyber Monday: 50% off Django book and videos
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:

What human-centered design can do for international development
Cross-posted with Creative Associates International. Written by Gina Assaf (Creative Associates International) and Tania Lee (Caktus Group). Image courtesy of Creative Associates International.

Initial Data in Django
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.

The Long, Hard Haul to Uncovering a Single, Tiny CSS Property Bug in IE10
There’s a very small but devastatingly crash-inducing bug in Internet Explorer 10. Watch out for setting a background-color to inherit on any pseudo element (like ::before and ::after), because this will crash IE completely every single time.

Open Sourcing SmartElect: Libya's SMS Voter Registration System
We are proud to say that, with the Libyan High National Elections Commission (HNEC) and consultative support from the United Nations Support Mission to Libya, we have open sourced their elections management platform today under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. Open sourcing means other governments and organizations can freely adopt and adapt the elections tools which cover nine functional areas. The tools range from SMS voter registration, the first of its kind, to bulk alerts to voters and call center support software. You can learn more at our brand new SmartElect homepage. This is the cumulation of two years of work, so we’re incredibly excited to share SmartElect with the rest of the world.

Identifying Racial Bias in Policing with a Data-driven App
Recently, Caktus co-founder Colin Copeland spoke about the creation of a web app that analyzes North Carolina traffic stop data to identify racial bias during the Code for America 2015 Summit. The website allows both police departments and community members to visualize a dataset of more than 18 million stops statewide. Colin spoke with Ian Mance, the originator of the app idea and staff attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Together with fellow community members, Andy Shapiro and Dylan Young, they used Django, an open source web framework, to make policing data more accessible.

A Peek Behind the Scenes at Caktus
Over the years, Caktus has had the opportunity to employ a wonderfully talented staff from a wide range of backgrounds. This summer we decided we would conduct a survey of Caktus staff. This infographic is the result of that study, and allows a little peek into the Cakti way of life. Conclusions: cats are great and coffee keeps you sharp!

ShipIt Day ReCap: Q4 2015
Members of one team joined forces with local meetup Code for Durham to help with the alpha launch of the School Navigator App. Using publicly available data, the School Navigator, allows users to geolocate nearby Durham schools and view information like performance ratings. The team included Code for Durham co-founder Colin Copeland who upgraded the Django template for the latest version of SALT. Erin Mullaney helped expand a feature denoting different school zones on the map, using Angular for the first time to do so. She also worked on a query change to more closely match the rules of districting on the map’s display. [Victor Rocha] developed various bug fixes, and merged pull requests. In the meantime, David Ray put his new Ionic skills to the test by building a mobile app version of the School Navigator, now available from the Google App store. (David’s starting Ship It Day project was working through an Ionic tutorial to create a Reddit viewing app with pull refresh and infinite scrolling.)

Django Girls Workshop Recap
This past Saturday we had the pleasure of holding a Django Girls RDU workshop at Caktus in downtown Durham, NC. We hosted 22 students and 10 coaches for a free, all-day coding workshop. Aimed at increasing diversity in tech and encouraging women to gain the skills they need to fall in love with coding, Django Girls is a global nonprofit that provides the framework for these workshops. In regular Django Girls style, the day was part party, part coding marathon and every student left having deployed their very own website!

Colin Copeland to Speak on Police Data and Racial Bias at Code for America Summit
This Thursday, Colin Copeland, CTO and Caktus Group Co-founder, will be co-presenting “Case Study from North Carolina: Identifying Racial Bias in Policing Practices” during the prestigious 2015 Code for America Summit in Oakland, CA. This invite-only event joins technologists, activists, and officials ranging from mayors to White House officials to discuss technology’s role in civic participation.