Caktus Blog

This past week, Project Mwana was a featured article on the site MobileActive. Project Mwana is a RapidSMS application that connects rural health clinic workers in Zambia and Malawi to HIV testing centers, increasing the collection and turn around time for results to over 50%. Tobias worked with the UNICEF Innovation team on the ground in Zambia and Malawi to assist with the systems architecture and training local developers to maintain the system. The RapidSMS platform allows the application to be easily scalable at a very affordable cost, making it one of the most efficient ways to connect people and send data between people. By the end of 2012, the goal is to have 250 clinics in Malawi using Project Mwana and complete coverage in Zambia by three years.

I’m excited to announce that on June 9th and 10th, Caktus will be hosting our first Django bootcamp. It will be a two day intensive bootcamp session where you’ll learn the basics of developing a web application using Django through constructing a crossword drill application, created by the Caktus staff. It will go over the architecture of Django and also different third party applications that will allow you to enhance the finished product. For more information regarding our bootcamp, you can check out the schedule of the day’s events.

I'm excited to announce that Caktus is looking for a developer to join our team on a contract basis!

We're looking for a strong software developer who enjoys working on a team and is excited to learn and experiment with new technologies. We do have a preference for local candidates, but will consider all submissions. Initial work will focus on maintaining small Django-powered websites. This position will involve managing existing Django projects, data modeling complex business ideas and deploying Django sites.

I'm excited to announce that Caktus is looking for candidates for our front end developer/designer summer internship program. It is a 12 week paid position in our Carrboro, NC office. We're driving distance from UNC Chapel Hill, NC State Univeristy in Raleigh, and Duke in Durham, so students from all parts of the NC Research Triangle are welcome to apply.

Caktus is sponsoring Pycon 2012 in Santa Clara, CA this coming weekend! Nearly the entire office will be attending this year's event, which means Mark, Caleb, Calvin, David, Karen, Dan, Tobias, Colin, Julia, Nicole and I will be on site contributing and learning with the rest of the Python community. Nicole and I will be in charge of manning the booth, and so if you managed to wrangle tickets to the sold-out event, we invite you to stop by our booth #213 and say hello! Also Karen, Mark and Calvin will be sprinting after the talks, working on Django and Python3 tickets.

Lately, I’ve been working on creating a simplified work flow for my front end work here at Caktus. There are all sorts of new and helpful tools to optimize the creative process, allowing for faster iterations, and greater overall enjoyment. As with any new tool, there are a few options to choose from: LESS and SASS. Having read lots of reviews and reading through the documentation, I’ve decided LESS is more for me.

We're pretty avid testers here at Caktus and when one of our Django projects required upgrading to Python 2.7, we also needed to upgrade our Jenkins build environment. Luckily, Jenkins supports distributed builds to allow a master install to delegate tasks to slaves instances. This way we can continue to run our primary build system on Ubuntu 10.04, which defaults to Python 2.6, and delegate tasks to an Ubuntu 11.04 environment running Python 2.7. The setup is fairly easy, but since I didn't find much out there already, I figured I write up a quick post outlining what we did.

Django class-based views

Introduction

Django 1.3 added class-based views, but neglected to provide documentation to explain what they were or how to use them. So here's a basic introduction.

The OpenBlock geocoder is powerful and robust. It uses PostGIS for spacial queries, can extract addresses from bodies of text, and can understand block and intersection notation. We've run into a few issues with it, however, including a low geocoding success rate. This is a tough problem to solve and depends on a lot of factors (the extent of street and block data in OpenBlock, format of the street addresses, etc.), so your mileage may vary. Below I constructed a simple test using Google's Geocoding API to have as an alternative.

Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a relatively new offering in the family of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's also an appealing one, because it proposes to quickly and easily replace a common component of the stack in a typical web application, thereby obviating the need to run a separate queue server like RabbitMQ. While RabbitMQ — the typical favorite for Celery users — is not necessarily difficult to install or maintain, removing it from the stack of a web application means one less component that might fail, offloading that service to AWS — especially for applications with a small to moderate queue volume — might prove financially advantageous.