Caktus Blog

Caktus has been involved in quite a few projects (Libyan voter registration, UNICEF Project Mwana, and several others) that include text messaging (a.k.a. Short Message Service, or SMS), and we always use RapidSMS as one of our tools. We’ve also invested our own resources in supporting and extending RapidSMS.

Caktus Group recently became a Durham Living Wage Certified Employer! The Durham Living Wage Certification Programis a project of the Durham People’s Alliance. The group asks that local businesses voluntarily certify themselves as living wage employers in order to identify, acknowledge, and celebrate those businesses. A living wage is the amount of income needed for an individual to meet her or his basic needs without public or private assistance. Caktus is proud to be a part of efforts to build a just and sustainable local economy.

Caktus is giving away a PyCon 2015 ticket, valued at $350. We love going to PyCon every year. It’s the largest gathering of developers using Python, the open source programming language that Caktus relies on. This year, it’ll be held April 8th-16th at the beautiful Palais des congrès de Montréal (the inspiration we used to design the website).

International Open Data Day is this weekend, February 21st and 22nd. As part of the festivities, Code for America is hosting its 4th annual CodeAcross. The event aims to unite developers across the country for a day of civic coding, creating tools that make government services simple, effective, easy to use. Put simply, “the goal of CodeAcross is to activate the Code for America network and inspire residents everywhere to get actively involved in their community.”

Our own Caleb Smith, Astro Code School lead instructor, is teaching this semester at UNC’s School of Journalism, one of the nation’s leading journalism schools. He’s sharing his enthusiasm for Django application development with undergraduate and graduate media students in a 500-level course, Advanced Interactive Development.

Brian Curtis, the director of the Python Software Foundation, recently interviewed and featured Caktus on the PyCon website. PyCon is the premiere event for those of us within the Python and Django open source communities. Brian writes about our work designing the PyCon 2015 website, our efforts in Libya, and what’s on the horizon in 2015. We’re excited about this recognition!

My colleague Vinod recently found the answer on Stack Overflow to something that’s been bugging me for a long time - why do my Django logging configurations so often not do what I think they should?

One of the best ways to grow the Django community is to have more high-quality Django developers. The good news is that we’ve seen sharply increasing demand for Django web applications. The challenge that we and many other firms face is that there’s much higher demand than there is supply: there aren’t enough high-quality Django developers. We’ve talked about this issue intensely internally and with our friends while at DjangoCon and PyCon. We decided that we can offer at least one solution: a new Django-focused code school.

I love writing blog posts, and today I’m setting out to do something I’ve never tried before: write a blog post about writing blog posts. A big part of our mission at Caktus is to foster and help grow the Python and Django development communities, both locally and nationally. Part of how we’ve tried to accomplish this in the past is through hosting development sprints, sponsoring and attending conferences such as PyCon and DjangoCon, and building a knowledge base of common problems in Python and Django development in our blog. Many in the Django community first get to know Caktus through our blog, and it’s both gratifying and humbling when I meet someone at a conference and the person thanks me for a post Caktus wrote that helped him or her solve a technical problem at some point in the past.

Over the last two years Caktus’ design portfolio has rapidly been growing. We’ve taken on new projects primarily focused on design and have received community recognition for those efforts. We are happy to have grown our design capabilities to match the level of quality we demand from our Django developers. We have found it’s important to have strength on both sides of the table as each side challenges the other and forces the final product of our process to be as high quality as possible.