Caktus Blog

This past Friday we celebrated another ShipIt day at Caktus. There was a lot of open source contribution, exploring, and learning happening in the office. The projects ranged from native mobile Firefox OS apps, to development on our automated server provisioning templates via Salt, to front-end apps aimed at using web technology to create interfaces where composing new music or performing Frozen’s Let It Go is so easy anyone can do it.

We have recently heard complaints about the painting over of the mural on the side of 108 Morris, the building we purchased and are restoring in Downtown Durham. I am personally distressed at this response. I see now, in retrospect, where we needed to work harder to discuss our decision with the community. In our enthusiasm to bring more life to Downtown Durham via ground-level retail space and offices for our staff, we were blind to what the public response might be to the mural. Its removal was not a decision taken lightly and one done in consultation with the Historic Preservation Commission. However, we handled this poorly. We apologize for not making more efforts to include the community in this decision.

Caktus participates in social impact projects around the world, but we believe in starting local. We’re proud of the many ways in which our staff contribute to local organizations, each making the world around us just a little better. To further support our employees, Caktus asks employees to suggest donations every quarter. This quarter, we’re sending contributions to the following five non-profits:

From time to time we inherit code bases running outdated versions of Django and part of our work is to get them running a stable and secure version. In the past year we've done upgrades from versions as old as 1.0 and we've learned a few lessons along the way.

Chapelboro.com recently featured Caktus’ work in implementing the first ever voter registration system via text message.

O'Reilly Media, the go-to source for technical books, just let us know that they're having a 50% off sale on eBook pre-orders of Lightweight Django today. Use coupon code: DEAL.

Is there a better way to celebrate the first day of summer than a baseball game? To ring in summer, the Caktus team and their families attended a Durham Bulls game. It was a great chance to hang out in our new city before relocating later this fall.

Caktus team members from our Libya mobile voter registration team recently spoke with TechPresident about the context and challenges of implementation.

The Triangle Business Journal recently featured our work in Libya on the first ever SMS voter registration system.

Today’s election in Libya, the second general election for a governing body since Gaddafi’s ouster, is being supported in-country by our Caktus team. Caktus developers created Libya's SMS voter registration system, the first of its kind in the world.