Caktus Blog

Our client social impact projects continue here at Caktus, with work presently being done in Libya, Nigeria, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and the US. But every quarter, we pause to consider the excellent nonprofits that our employees volunteer for and, new this quarter, that they have identified as having a substantive influence on their lives. The following list represents employee-nominated nonprofits which we are giving to in alphabetical order:

Caktus had a great time at DjangoCon in Portland this year! We met up with old friends and new. The following staff gave talks (we’ll update this post with videos as soon as they’re available):

Update: Congratulations to @dmpayton for winning this giveaway!

Caktus is giving away a DjangoCon ticket valued at $850! DjangoCon is the main US Django conference and it’s returning to Portland this year, August 30 - September 4th. Meet fellow Django developers, learn what others are doing, and have a good time!

Caleb Smith recently gave a talk, “Intro to Celery,” at PyOhio (video below). Celery is a pretty popular topic for us here at Caktus. We use it often in our client work and find it very handy. So we were happy Caleb was out in the world, promoting its use. We sat down with him to hear more about PyOhio and Celery.

Caleb Smith, a developer at Caktus, will be guest lecturing tomorrow to the inaugral class at the Iron Yard in Durham. Iron Yard is a code school that trains its students in modern programming practices and prepares them for immediate hiring upon graduation. Tobias, our CEO, is on the school’s employer advisory board. Caleb will be speaking on his experience as a Python developer. As an exclusive Python shop, we here at Caktus naturally think it’s the best language for new students–28 of the top 30 universities agree.

Mark Lavin, Caktus Technical Director and author of the forthcoming LightWeight Django was recently at OSCON 2014 in Portland where he gave a talk on improving the relationship between server and client for REST APIs. OSCON, with over 3000 attendees, is one of the largest open source conferences around. I sat down with him to ask him about his time there.

PyCon 2015’s website launched today (a day early!). PyCon is the premiere conference for the Python community and one we look forward to attending every year. We’re honored that the Python Software Foundation returned to us this year to revamp the site. We were especially happy to work again with organizer-extraordinaires Ewa Jodlowska and Diana Clarke.

Code reviews are one of those things that everyone agrees are worthwhile, but sometimes don’t get done. A good way to keep getting the benefits of code reviews is to establish, and even nurture, a culture of code reviews.

Recently Caktus collaborated with the organizers of PyOhio, a free regional Python conference, to launch the PyOhio 2014 conference website. The conference starts this weekend, July 26 - 27. As in prior years, the conference web site utilizes Eldarion’s Symposion, an opensource conference management system. Symposion powers a number of annual conference sites including PyCon and DjangoCon. In fact, as of this writing, there are 78 forks of Symposion, a nod to its widespread use for events both large and small. This collaboration afforded us the opportunity to abide by one our core tenets, that of giving back to the community.

Election day voting on June 25th. Image courtesy of HNEC.

Since this interview was done, Libya’s capitol began experiencing more violence. As of today, militias are fighting over control of the Tripoli international airport, the primary way in and out of this section of Libya. We’re keeping our friends and colleagues in Libya in our thoughts in these truly difficult times. This post speaks to the energy and talent of the Libyans we’ve worked with during this challenging democratic transition.