Caktus Blog

I'm delighted to welcome Karey Tracey to our growing team of web developers here at Caktus. Karen is a core developer of the Django web framework and specializes in the development and testing of applications for the web. She is also the author of Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging, published by Packt Publishing in April, 2010.

We're pleased to announce the release of the latest and greatest Caktus web presence yet. This edition features an enhanced services section and portfolio. Among other things, the new site demonstrates how our Django-based content management system can be used to connect related pages in customized, innovative ways.

Deployment is usually a tedious process with lots of tinkering until everything is setup just right. We deploy quite a few Django sites on a regular basis here at Caktus and still do tinkering, but we've attempted to functionalize some of the core tasks to ease the process. I've put together a basic example that outlines local and remote environment setup. This is a simplified example and just one of many ways to deploy a Django project (I learned a lot from Jacob Kaplan-Moss' django-deployment-workshop), so I encourage you to browse around the Django community to learn more. The entire source for this example project can be found in the caktus-deployment Bitbucket repository.

Django is a tool we use every day to build fantastic web apps here at Caktus, and a development sprint is a concerted, focused period of time in which developers meet in the same space to get things done on a project.

Like just about everyone else, we've written our own suite of tools to help with building complex content management systems in Django here at Caktus. We reviewed a number of the existing CMSes out there, but in almost every case the navigation and page structure were so tightly coupled the system broke down when it came time to add additional, non-CMS pages.

We're always looking for new tools to make our development environment more robust here at Caktus. We write a lot of tests to ensure proper functionality as new features land and bug fixes are added to our projects. The next step is to integrate with a continuous integration system to automate the process and regularly check that status of the build.

Python and Django are tools we use on a daily basis to build fantastic web apps here at Caktus. I'm pleased to announce that Caktus is sending five developers--Colin, Alex, Mike, Mark, and myself--to PyCon 2010! PyCon is an annual gathering for users and developers of the open source Python programming language. This year the US conference is being held in Atlanta, GA. We'll be driving down tomorrow (Thursday) from Chapel Hill, NC and staying for the conference weekend plus one day of the sprints.

Django is a tool we use every day to build rock-solid web apps here at Caktus, and a development sprint is a concerted, focused period of time in which developers meet in the same space to get things done on a project.

Django's ORM is great. It handles simple to fairly complex queries right out the box without having to write any SQL. If you need a complicated query, Django's lets you use .extra(), and you can always fallback to raw SQL if need be, but then you lose the ORM's bells and whistles. So it's always nice to find solutions that allow you to tap into the ORM at different levels.

We're pleased to announce that Caktus is looking for a developer to join our team on a contract basis!

What do we do? We build custom web applications for local and remote clients using a variety of open-source technologies. We are a small team founded in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area (currently residing in Carrboro Creative Coworking) who believe in face-to-face contact and employ agile development techniques that emphasize teamwork and collaboration.