Caktus Blog

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables monitoring and recording of account activities. In this post, we will use CloudTrail to monitor CPU usage and to monitor our nodes. We will use Ansible to automate the setup process and as a means to document our setup (IaC). This post assumes you already have Ansible set up for your project and will not provide setup instructions.

Recently I’ve been working with projects that use GitHub submodules. According to GitHub, submodules “allow you to include or embed one or more repositories as a sub-folder inside another repository.” Submodules help us keep code dry when functionality is shared across multiple repositories.

Introduction

Caktus is committed to developing and maintaining high-quality web applications for clients, so we focus on software sustainability. Software sustainability refers to the ability of software to continue to function as expected over time, even as hardware and software environments change. It involves maintaining and updating software to remain reliable, secure, and compatible with new hardware and software technologies. Additionally, from a security perspective, attackers can exploit software vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to systems or data. Keeping software up-to-date with the latest security patches helps to reduce the risk of these vulnerabilities being exploited.

We regularly use tools like PostgreSQL, Pandas, and Jupyter Notebooks to analyze data here at Caktus. Recently, we were reviewing North Carolina traffic stop data for the NC CopWatch project and had the opportunity to use PostgreSQL's window functions, which are helpful when aggregating data.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about scoring in the NBA because LeBron James surpassed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with 38,390 career points. I have noticed that there is not much discussion about post-season scoring, so I searched for this dataset on Kaggle (nba_playoffs.csv) which contains the top 25 all-time post-season scoring leaders. Post-season scoring is its own beast. Since teams face one opponent multiple times in a row, they can better concentrate on the opposing team and its individual players, particularly star players. This results in improved defenses across the board. However, the post-season also means players improving their game. What is the result of improved defenses and players alike? Only elite players score consistently and thus, only the NBA's elite are on this list. This post will first examine the dataset using Pandas and then use Seaborn to graph such data.

What is Normalized Data?

In the early 2000s, I had a paper test that I gave to developer candidates. It was a single sheet that I printed out from Excel, in landscape, containing order data from a small fictional online bookstore. I asked each candidate to normalize the data from the spreadsheet by drawing and writing on a blank sheet of paper I provided.

I haven’t always been a Software Developer….Imagine that.

I spent 20 years in Corporate America where I took my career as far as I could without holding a college degree, so I’m definitely not green when it comes to work experience. What a stark difference from my past work experience and my current situation: the corporate world was a dog eat dog kind of world versus the collaborative nature of developing I’m in currently.

During the past year, we’ve begun a new program for folks looking for training prior to beginning a career in web development. This program has paired Caktus with a local coding bootcamp to sponsor several students’ learning, and subsequently to continue our relationship with those students, which has led to a full-time position for several of them. Read below for details on how the fellowship has worked. Looking for more information about mentorship at Caktus? Check out A New Mentorship Program.

ODK is a popular tool for offline data collection with a thriving user community. Like a number of other offline data collection tools, it uses the XLSForm standard for authoring forms. While convenient to author and exchange, authoring the forms in Excel means each iteration of the form must be uploaded to the ODK Central server that distributes forms to mobile data collection applications, such as ODK Collect.

Back in the Day: BFF Music Bytes

Picture this: the year is 2003 and two young women are far from home. They're joining thousands of contemporaries in the pursuit of independence, education, and community. One of them hailing from the bluegrass state, the other from the Motown Records capital city of Detroit, both of them trepidatiously ready to call North Carolina home for the next nine months. Their hometowns couldn’t be more different, but one night after a full day of orientation, one of them spies the other reading a familiar book. Not only were books the key to her heart, but to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in this Detroit girl's hands was nothing short of the magic infused within the book’s pages. From that moment on, she knew they would be the two best friends that anyone could have. And it was so.