Caktus Blog

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

My recommendation would be Catherine Bracy’s Keynote about Code for America. Cakti should be familiar with Code for America. Colin Copeland, Caktus CTO, is the founder of Code for Durham and many of us are members. Her talk made it clear how important this work is. She was funny, straight-talking, and inspirational. For a long time before I joined Caktus, I was a “hobbyist” programmer. I often had time to program, but wasn’t sure what to build or make. Code for America is a great opportunity for people to contribute to something that will benefit all of us. I have joined Code for America and hope to contribute locally soon through Code for Durham.

Last Friday everyone at Caktus set aside their regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for Caktus employees to take some time 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 game development to Bokeh data visualization, Lego robots to superhero animation. Read more about the various projects from our Q2 2015 ShipIt Day.

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

Sarah Bird’s talk made me excited to try the Bokeh tutorials. The Bokeh library has very approachable methods for creating data visualizations inside of Canvas elements all via Python. No javascript necessary. Who should see this talk? Python developers who want to add a beautiful data visualization to their websites without writing any javascript. Also, Django developers who would like to use QuerySets to create data visualizations should watch the entire video, and then rewind to minute 8:50 for instructions on how to use Django QuerySets with a couple of lines of code.

After PyCon 2015, we were surprised when we realized how many Cakti who attended had all been asked about Django’s class-based views (CBVs). We talked about why this might be, and this is a summary of what we came up with.

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

I think everyone who codes in any language and uses any automated PEP-8 or linter sort of code checker should watch this talk. Unfortunately to go into any detail on what I learned (or really was reminded of) would ruin the effect of actually watching the talk. I’d encourage everyone to watch it. I came away from the talk wanting to figure out a way to incorporate its lesson into our Caktus development practices.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve won two Communicator Awards in this year’s 2015 Communicator Awards competition. With over 6000 entries received from across the US and around the world, the Communicator Awards is considered the largest and most competitive international awards program honoring creative excellence for communications professionals.

This was the first year Caktus Group participated in the AIGA studio tour and the turnout was amazing. From 5:30 PM till the 9:00 PM close, we had visitors ranging from students to tenured professionals in the design and web development fields sharing stories and touring the newly renovated Caktus Group office. Members from the Caktus design, development, and management teams were present to field questions, give tours, and show select works from the past year.

Recently, one of our projects, Service Info, received national attention thanks to a Marketplace interview. American Public Media’s Kai Ryssdal spoke with International Rescue Committee CEO David Miliband about how Service Info is helping 1.5 million refugees of the Syrian conflict in Lebanon. The Syrian conflict is one of the worst ongoing humanitarian crises, accounting for the majority of the world’s refugees.

Whether you couldn’t make it to PyCon this year, were busy attending one of the other amazing talks, or were simply too enthralled by the always popular “hallway track”, there are bound to be talks you missed out on. Thankfully, the PyCon staff does an amazing job not only organizing the conference for the attendees and the days of the conference, but also by producing recordings of all the talks for anyone who couldn’t attend. Even if you attended, you couldn’t have seen every talk, so these recordings are a great safety net.

Our Astro Code School is now officially accepting applications to its twelve-week Python & Django Web Development class for intermediate programmers! To kick off Astro’s opening, we asked Caktus’ CTO and co-founder Colin Copeland, who recently won a 2015 Triangle Business Journal 40 Under 40 Leadership Award, and Astro’s Director Brian Russell to reflect on the development of Astro as well as the role they see the school playing in the Django community.