Caktus Blog

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.

This is Caktus’ first year taking part in the Catholic Relief Service’s (CRS) Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) conference. The theme of this year’s conference is increasing the impact of aid and development tools through innovation. We’re especially looking forward to all of the speakers from organizations like the International Rescue Committee, USAID, World Vision, and the American Red Cross. In fact, the offerings are so vast, we thought we would provide a little cheat sheet to help you find Cakti throughout this year’s conference.

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

From Ryan Kelly’s talk I learned that it is actually possible, today, to run Python in a web browser (not something that interprets Python-like syntax and translates it into JavaScript, but an actual Python interpreter!). PyPy.js combines two technologies, PyPy (the Python interpreter written in Python) and Emscripten (an LLVM-to-JavaScript converter, typically used for getting games running in the browser), to run PyPy in the browser. This talk is a must-see for anyone who’s longed before to write client-side Python instead of JavaScript for a web app. While realistically being able to do this in production may still be a ways off, at least in part due to the multiple megabytes of JavaScript one needs to download to get it working, I enjoyed the view Ryan’s talk provided into the internals of this project. PyPy itself is always fascinating, and this talk made it even more so.

We’re pleased to officially announce the launch of a new meetup: Durham Women in Tech (DWiT). Through group discussions, lectures, panels, and social gatherings, we hope to provide a safe space for women in small and medium-sized Durham tech firms to share challenges, ideas, and solutions. We especially want to support women on the business side in roles such as operations, marketing, business development, finance, and project management.