Caktus Blog

Have you heard of Jerry Lawson or Kimberly Bryant? No? You’re not the only one … I hadn’t either, until earlier this month. Both of them are trailblazers in the tech industry, who we’re recognizing as part of our celebration of Black History Month.

The year 2021 is upon us, and February is a fine month to kick off a long-term culture of learning and celebration of the contributions of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to our collective history! One of the most pervasive and enduring contributions of Black people to world culture is through rhythm and sound.

Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash

Like many conferences in 2020, DjangoCon Europe was held virtually. I’m glad I had the opportunity to attend because the sessions provided insight and information that I’m still applying. In light of the pandemic and the social changes it’s caused, I’ve come to know that web development and the solutions it provides are at the heart of how we are navigating this challenging time. Here are three talks from DjangoCon Europe that I believe will help you protect, maintain, and develop projects.

At Caktus, we maintain some open source packages, which are usually pieces of code that we’ve found useful when building an application, and we figure they might be useful to others. From time to time, those open source projects need a little maintenance: Maybe a bug fix has been provided from a community member, or we need to update to support a new version of Python or Django. I always hesitate to do this because I know there are multiple steps involved to ensure that any updates are properly tested, documented, versioned, and released. One of my silly blockers is that I always seem to forget how to upload a release to PyPI, which is the Python Package Index, a repository of software for Python. I call it silly because it shouldn’t really be a blocker, seeing how simple it actually is, but I still forget it each time and have to walk through the documentation step by step to make sure I do it properly. I recently found a tool that helps with this process.

I remember being really impressed the first time I encountered single sign-on (SSO), in which I could access multiple websites after just logging in once. But I was even more impressed when I learned that underlying SSO are just a few, basic HTTP features.

October 2020 marked the 14th anniversary of the introduction of “let” and "const" to Javascript. Yes, it was in 2006 that this feature was first introduced, and we’re still having conversations about it. So why, you ask, are we still talking about this? It seems that a lot of confusion remains, not to mention a lot of old code being passed around on StackOverflow with “var” all over the place. Here I’ll discuss the difference between these three declarations, and come to a conclusion about best practices

This is how to set up the One True Development Environment for Python.

Haha, just kidding, there is no such thing. Here's one way to do it that works for me, and an attempt to explain the benefits of doing it this way.

We’ve published summaries of our most popular blog posts before (see Top 19 of 2019 and Top 18 of 2018), but this time, we’re taking it a step further. We’re sharing the 20 most popular posts in 2020, regardless of the year the post was originally published. And some of these have been around a while! Based on total pageviews, here are the blogs that rose to the top of the popularity list, from most viewed to least viewed.

I keep up with what's happening in my field by following a number of blogs and an occasional email list. I don't read everything posted in all of these, but by scanning the topics in a feed reader, I can keep up with what's going on, without wasting a lot of time.

Part two of a two-part series. View part one.

Stateless authentication with JSON Web Tokens  —  safely!

As developers who build REST APIs, we are quite familiar with JSON Web Token (JWT) based authentication. The typical pattern is this: