Djangogirls

Last Friday, Caktus set aside client projects for our regular quarterly ShipIt Day. From gerrymandered districts to RPython and meetup planning, the team started off 2017 with another great ShipIt.

Members of one team joined forces with local meetup Code for Durham to help with the alpha launch of the School Navigator App. Using publicly available data, the School Navigator, allows users to geolocate nearby Durham schools and view information like performance ratings. The team included Code for Durham co-founder Colin Copeland who upgraded the Django template for the latest version of SALT. Erin Mullaney helped expand a feature denoting different school zones on the map, using Angular for the first time to do so. She also worked on a query change to more closely match the rules of districting on the map’s display. [Victor Rocha] developed various bug fixes, and merged pull requests. In the meantime, David Ray put his new Ionic skills to the test by building a mobile app version of the School Navigator, now available from the Google App store. (David’s starting Ship It Day project was working through an Ionic tutorial to create a Reddit viewing app with pull refresh and infinite scrolling.)

This past Saturday we had the pleasure of holding a Django Girls RDU workshop at Caktus in downtown Durham, NC. We hosted 22 students and 10 coaches for a free, all-day coding workshop. Aimed at increasing diversity in tech and encouraging women to gain the skills they need to fall in love with coding, Django Girls is a global nonprofit that provides the framework for these workshops. In regular Django Girls style, the day was part party, part coding marathon and every student left having deployed their very own website!

We’re incredibly excited to announce the launch of Django Girls RDU, a group in NC’s Triangle region that hosts free one-day Django coding workshops for women. Django Girls is part of an international movement that’s helped 1,600 (and counting!) women learn how to code.

The best part of PyCon? Definitely the people. This is my fifth PyCon, so I’ve had a chance to see the event evolve, especially with the fantastic leadership of Ewa Jodlowska and Diana Clarke. We were also lucky enough to work with them on the PyCon 2015 website. This year we were once again located in the Centre-Ville section of Montreal, close to lots of great restaurants and entertainment.

We’re very excited for PyCon 2015 and can’t wait for the fun to begin. Working on the PyCon website stoked our excitement early, so it’s almost surreal that PyCon is finally here. With an overwhelming number of great events, we wanted to highlight ones Caktus and our staff will be taking part in. Below you’ll find a list of where we’ll be each day. Please join us!