Django

We finished up last week with another successful ShipIt Day. ShipIt Days are quarterly events where we put down client work for a little bit and focus on learning, stretching ourselves, and sharing. Everyone chooses to work together or individually on an itch or a project that has been on the back of their mind for the last few months. This time, we stretched ourselves by trying out new frameworks, languages, and pluggable apps. Here are some of the projects we worked on during ShipIt Day:

Caktus is headed to Philadelphia for our seventh DjangoCon. We’re Gold Sponsors this year, so definitely come by our booth to chat with our team and grab t-shirts, stickers, and a 40% off coupon for Lightweight Django, co-written by our technical director, Mark Lavin. Also be sure to enter our raffle for an Amazon Echo.

The Django 1.8 release added support for complex query expressions. The documentation has some nice examples but they don't do justice to how crazy awesome these are. In this post, we will go through some additional examples of how to leverage these expressions.

The Journal of Medical Internet Research recently published “Epic Allies: Development of a Gaming App to Improve Antiretroviral Therapy Adherence Among Young HIV-Positive Men Who Have Sex With Men”. Epic Allies, initially funded by a federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, represents a partnership between Caktus, UNC’s Institute of Global Health and Infection Diseases, and Duke Global Health Institute.

PyCon, beyond being the best community event for Python developers, is also an event that we happily began thinking about eleven months ago. Almost as soon as PyCon 2015 ended, we had the good fortune of planning the look and feel of PyCon 2016 with organizer extraordinaires Ewa Jodlowska, Diana Clark, and new this year, Brandon Rhodes. Our team has loved working with the organizers on the PyCon websites for the past three years now. They’re great people who always prioritize the needs of PyCon attendees, whether that’s babysitting services or a smooth PyCon web experience.

The environment at Caktus is, above all, one of encouragement. I experienced that encouragement as an intern and continue to experience it as a full-time developer. In addition to providing workplace mentorship, Caktus encourages all of its employees to submit talks to conferences. My manager Mark Lavin and mentor Karen Tracy encouraged me to get over my concerns about being new to the field and to start submitting talks.

Below you can find this month’s roundup of articles and posts shared by Cakti that drew the most attention on Twitter. The list covers coding for matrix factorization algorithms in Python, designing apps that optimize for sequential dual screen usage, preventing technical debt, and understanding the complexities and limitations involved in building apps for low-income American families.

As Django developers, we always look forward to PyCon. This year, working with the Python Software Foundation on the design for PyCon 2016’s site kindled our enthusiasm early. Our team is so excited for all the fun to begin. With an array of fantastic events, speakers, and workshops, we thought we would highlight all the events we’ll be participating in. Come find us!

Mark Lavin will be giving the keynote address at Python Nordeste this year. Python Nordeste is the largest gathering of the Northeast Python community, which takes place annually in cities of northeastern Brazil. This year’s conference will be held in Teresina, the capital of the Brazilian state of Piauí.

We at Caktus were incredibly proud when the White House Police Data Initiative invited CTO Colin Copeland to celebrate their first year accomplishments. While at the White House, Colin also joined private breakout sessions to share ideas with law enforcement officials, city staff, and other civic technologists from across the country. Colin is the co-founder of Code for Durham and served as lead developer for OpenDataPolicingNC.com. OpenDataPolicingNC.com, a site built for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, displays North Carolina police stop data.