Caktus Blog

It’s another collaboration Friday during this celebration of Black History Month with Caktus! Here is a list of books that team member Keanya Phelps read and loved, along with an accompanying soundtrack curated by Lindsey Ardrey.

Wouldn’t it be useful if we could document changes in our life and revisit them later at will? It would allow us to better analyze situations, remember what we were thinking, or help us remember how we got to our current state. Although no such tool currently exists for changes in life, one such tool does exist in Django. It is called django-simple-history.

Gather a group of friends and family, put on your dancing shoes, and flashback to the 80s with Keanya Phelps’ playlist. Enjoy a vibrant weekend, folks!

Black History Month, recently also referred to as Black Futures Month, is all about celebrating freedom. What is freedom and how do we make sure it's here to stay? Let these recommendations from teammates Jeanette O'Brien (photo credit) and Gerald Carlton help you to dream yourself free and then act upon those visions.

Every work project, or weekend dance party deserves a worthy soundtrack and we’re not here to disappoint. Team members Keanya Phelps and Lindsey Ardrey invite you to open your ears and let the musical notes of these artists drift into your ears. Happy first Friday of Black History Month, folks!

React is a powerful JavaScript library for building user interfaces, but it is important to avoid certain common mistakes that can hinder the performance, maintainability, and scalability of your application. Here are three React anti-patterns that you should be aware of:

Two years ago, I created a blog post entitled Chords and Code: 52 Black Artists to Add to Your Work Playlist. My Co-Guiding Life Partner, Eshé (credited in the photo), had just completed their first sun (r)evolution and began their second tour of life on earth. Caktus had just started transitioning to a delayered, autonomous organizational structure while simultaneously working to finalize our plans to become an employee-owned company (which we accomplished in 2022!). I was the only BIPOC-identifying cis-female person on our team.

My Dearest HTML,

Shall I compare thee to another Markup language? Thou art more foundational and more essential to how we consume web content!

Ronard’s Recap

“It takes a village” the African proverb goes. Nowhere was this as apparent as in DjangoCon. It was my first technology conference and my experience could not have been better. People from the most senior developer to fellow juniors and even one of the co-creators of Django made the experience feel warm and inviting. Perhaps knowing that you are surrounded by introverts alleviates the social pressure, knowing that everyone has a common interest, or perhaps even love for programming also brought a soothing feeling to the experience.

With all of the global changes from the past few years, some of us have been thinking a fair amount about the way that folks at our company, as well as in web development, grow in their careers. Initially, this conversation began with the desire to attract new developers to our company. However, as we continued discussing, we realized that it would also be beneficial to think about how to help people at our company grow in their careers. As a result, Kel Hanna and I have worked together to come up with a structure for more junior folks at our company to grow in their careers. I’m sharing some thoughts about it here, since we’re excited to see it in action, and in case it may allow others to implement similar ideas at their workplace.