Caktus Blog

In the July 16 episode of Modern CTO, Colin Copeland, Caktus Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer goes one-on-one with podcast host Joel Beasley. They discuss the:

I had the opportunity to attend PyCon US, which was held entirely virtually. Though an in-person experience is impossible to replicate (the last time I attended PyCon in person was in 2018), I found that many aspects of the live conference were still available in an online format. Here are some of my highlights:

Have you heard of the Django Chat podcast? With more than 90 episodes on all things Django, it’s full of informative interviews featuring some of the best and brightest in the industry.

We regularly update and improve our upgrades and sustainability service offerings at Caktus, and a recent upgrade for a client precipitated a solution that I felt might be worth sharing. At Caktus, the preferred approach for addressing upgrades and sustainability is to make incremental updates to a project over time, trying to keep both Django and the servers themselves on a long-term support version. These are select versions of Django and Ubuntu, for example, that generally have much longer support periods than other versions, i.e., they are a good fit for applications that you will need to continue maintaining well into the future.

When removing fields from Django models, or adding non-nullable fields, it can be hard to avoid a mismatch between code running on some servers and the database in use.

In March 2020, with the first wave of the coronavirus hitting the US, Caktus sent all its employees home. One year later, with working from home still in effect, our days punctuated by virtual meetings via Google Hangouts and chats via Slack, our co-founders decided it was time to connect in another way.

PyCon US 2021 will be completely virtual this year. For the first time ever you’ll be able to enjoy this popular event from the comfort of your favorite armchair!

In Part 1 of this blog series, we started looking at how we can use mocking to improve our unit tests. We'll expand on that in this post.

Last year, Apple announced that they would transition their entire Mac line from Intel processors to their ARM64 Apple Silicon chip called the M1. Several weeks ago, I started testing development on MacBook Air with the Apple M1 chip (pictured above).

We've written in the past about the importance of unit tests and how to write better ones: Culture of Unit Testing, Subtests are the Best.