Caktus Blog

Monthly, we organize short Lightning Talks that take place during the lunch hour here at Caktus. Not only does this allow us a wonderful excuse to have lunch delivered from one of our many local foodie options, but it’s an excellent chance to expand our knowledge on a variety of topics. Past talks have included everything from an introduction to synthesizers and other forms of electronic music, to bug fixing, to the design inspiration behind our PyCon 2015 site.

We’re very pleased to announce that Caktus Group will be sponsoring up to $20,000 worth of scholarships for Astro Code School students per year. There will be twenty $1,000 scholarships. We hope that these scholarships help increase access to code schools and the wider tech industry:

At this year’s mHealth at Duke 2015 Conference, Dr. Lisa Hightow-Weidman discussed her current mHealth projects for HIV prevention. Chief among these projects is her work with Caktus Group on Epic Allies, a mobile gaming app that utilizes social media and mini-games to increase adherence to prescribed medication amongst HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM).

The Stanford Social Innovation Review recently featured Caktus in “Text the Vote” in Suzie Boss’ “What’s Next: New Approaches to Social Change” column. It describes how our team of developers built the world’s first SMS voter registration system in Libya using RapidSMS.

Part six of six in our PyCon 2015 Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff enjoyed at PyCon.

I’ve had an interest in robotics since high school, but always thought it would be expensive and time consuming to actually do. Over the past few years, though, I’ve observed the rise of open hardware such as the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, and modules and kits built on top of them, that make this type of project more affordable and accessible to the casual hobbyist. I was excited by Katherine’s talk because Robot Operating System (ROS) seems to do for the software side what Arduino and such do for the hardware side.

I had the opportunity to give a webcast for O’Reilly Media during which I encountered a presenter’s nightmare: a broken demo. Worse than that it was a test failure in a presentation about testing. Is there any way to salvage such an epic failure?

The Caktus office is now home to a weekly yoga class for the tech community of Durham. Via our employee suggestion box, Lead Designer Ross Pike recommended a Caktus yoga class. Through team effort that suggestion will come to fruition next week. Starting Thursday, June 11th, we will be offering a yoga class taught by professional instructor Christina Conley. The class will be open to the public at large and will be held in our community meeting space at our offices in downtown Durham.

This past Saturday, Caktus developer Rebecca Conley taught a 4-hour introductory level workshop in Django hosted by PyLadies RDU. PyLadies RDU is the local chapter of an international mentorship group for women who love coding in Python. Their main focus is to empower women to become more active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community.

Choosing an open source product or platform upon which to build an ICT4D service is hard. Creating a sustainable, volunteer-driven open source project is even harder. There is a proliferation of open source tools in the world, but the messaging used to describe a given project does not always line up with the underlying technology. For example, the project may make claims about modularity or pluggability that, upon further investigation, prove to be exaggerations at best. Similarly, managers of ICT4D projects may be attracted to Open Source because of the promise of a “free” product, but as we’ve learned through trial and error at Caktus, it’s not always less costly to adapt an existing open source project than it would be to engineer a quality system from the ground up.

This past Tuesday we held our very first gathering for the new Durham Women in Tech (D-WiT) Meetup group. There was a huge turnout and a lot of enthusiasm for the community we’re seeking to support and build. It was particularly wonderful to see our recently opened Astro Code School space full of people.