Caktus Blog

Though our projects often have us addressing issues around the globe, we like to turn our focus to the local level once a quarter with our charitable giving program. Each quarter we ask our employees to suggest charities and organizations that they are involved in or have had a substantive influence on their lives. It’s our way of supporting not only our own employees, but the wider community in which we live and work. This quarter we are pleased to be sending contributions to the following organizations:

Caktus co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Colin Copeland, is among an outstanding group of top business leaders to receive the Triangle Business Journal’s 2015 40 Under 40 Leadership Award. The award recognizes individuals for their remarkable contributions to their organizations and to the community.

The best part of PyCon? Definitely the people. This is my fifth PyCon, so I’ve had a chance to see the event evolve, especially with the fantastic leadership of Ewa Jodlowska and Diana Clarke. We were also lucky enough to work with them on the PyCon 2015 website. This year we were once again located in the Centre-Ville section of Montreal, close to lots of great restaurants and entertainment.

Since moving to Durham in Fall 2014, we’ve been busy here at Caktus. We just finished renovating the first floor of our headquarters to bring the Triangle’s (and East Coast’s!) first Django and Python code school, Astro Code School. We’re proud to say that the school is now officially open and we’ll be celebrating with a public launch party on May 1st.

The Art of Cool festival is a staple of spring happenings in the Triangle. A three-day festival to present, promote, and preserve jazz and jazz-influenced music, The Art of Cool always promises to be a great time for those interested in music, art, and delicious food from Durham’s many food trucks. But what does music have to do with programming and app development? This year, Caktus Group is helping to sponsor a new portion of the festival called Innovate Your Cool. Innovate Your Cool celebrates the power of cool ideas, advancing innovative thinking by bringing together intelligent people with radically new ideas.

Quite often, people undertake internships at the beginning of their career. For me, it was a mid-career direction change and a leap of faith. In order to facilitate this career move, I took a Rails Engineering class at The Iron Yard in the fall of 2014. I had limited experience as a developer and no experience in Django prior to my internship at Caktus. Because of the structure and support Caktus provided and my enthusiasm for becoming a developer, my internship turned out to be the ideal way for me to make the transition from a novice to a professional developer.

We’re very excited for PyCon 2015 and can’t wait for the fun to begin. Working on the PyCon website stoked our excitement early, so it’s almost surreal that PyCon is finally here. With an overwhelming number of great events, we wanted to highlight ones Caktus and our staff will be taking part in. Below you’ll find a list of where we’ll be each day. Please join us!

_{Image via Diamond Hacks Facebook Page}

This past weekend, Technical Director Mark Lavin came out to support DiamondHacks, NCSU’s first ever hackathon and conference event for women interested in computer science. Not only is NCSU Mark’s alma mater, but he’s also a strong supporter of co-organizer Girl Develop It RDU (GDI), of which Caktus is an official sponsor.

We’ve hit one of our greatest growth points yet in 2015, adding nine new team members since January to handle our increasing project load. There are many exciting things on the horizon for Caktus and our clients, so it’s wonderful to have a few more hands on deck.

I’m really happy to officially announce the first Python and Django Web Engineering class at Astro Code School. I’ll outline some details here and you can also find them on our classes page.