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Chicago Like a Local: Things to Do During DjangoCon US 2025 (Part 1)

DjangoCon US 2025 is coming to Chicago, and while you’ll be busy soaking in all things Django, there’s no reason you can’t experience the city like a local while you’re here. Whether you’re looking for great food, cultural spots, or just a cool place to unwind, here are some top recommendations from a Chicago native.

We recently hosted the first Caktus Pitch Competition: Building Tech for Good, which aimed to draw out innovative ideas and help make them a reality. While any web development ideas were welcome, preference was given to projects serving the public good.

We are pleased to continue serving the North Carolina community at-large through our semi-annual Charitable Giving Program. Twice a year we solicit proposals from our team to contribute to a variety of non-profit organizations. With this program, we look to support groups in which Cakti are involved or that have impacted their lives in some way. This gives Caktus a chance to support our own employees as well as the wider community. For the first half of 2019 we are pleased to support the following charities:

Pictured: Scott, Kat, and Tim take a quick break for a game of cards.

It may be no surprise that there are gamers among our Caktus crew, but you may be surprised by the type of games that Cakti play. From the ancient art of Mahjong to the modern fun of Pokemon, our team members cover it all.

Pictured: Our library of reference books at Caktus cover topics including Django and Python, as well as project management and Agile methodologies.

Pictured: Developer Dan Poirier is an advocate for WCPE and a volunteer announcer. WCPE is one of the recipients of our charitable giving program.

Pictured: Simone Sequeira, Senior Product Manager of GetCalFresh, with event attendees at Caktus.

On August 11, I attended the National Day of Civic Hacking hosted by Code for Durham. More than 30 attendees came to the event, hosted in the Caktus Group Tech Space, to collaborate on civic projects that focus on the needs of Durham residents.

Twice a year we solicit proposals from our team to contribute to a variety of non-profit organizations. With this program, we look to support groups in which Cakti are involved or that have impacted their lives in some way. This gives Caktus a chance to support our own employees as well as the wider community. For the first half of 2018, we are pleased to donate to the following organizations:

Twice a year we solicit proposals from the team for contributions to non-profit organizations in which individual Cakti are involved or that have impacted their lives. Our charitable giving program is a chance to support not only our own employees but the wider community. This quarter we are pleased to donate to the following organizations.

Go to any major city and you will be able to find a user group for just about every major, modern programming language. Developers meet in their off hours to discuss what’s new in their language of choice, challenges they’ve encountered, and different ways of doing things. If you’ve never been to one of these groups, it might be easy to brush them off as an unimportant outlet where people talk in way too much detail about a geeky interest. Instead, most of the attendees are professionals who are looking to build skills and find new ways to solve problems.