Game

Last Friday, the Cakti set aside regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day was all about open source contributions, frontend fixes, and learning new (or revisiting old) programming languages. Read about the various ShipIt Day projects for Q2 of 2016 below.

Last Friday marked another ShipIt Day at Caktus, a chance for our employees to set aside client work for experimentation and personal development. It’s always a wonderful chance for our developers to test new boundaries, learn new skills and sometimes even build something entirely new in a single day.

This past weekend, our wonderful Technology Support Specialist Scott Morningstar hosted a Local Area Network (LAN) party at Caktus HQ. Held twice a year since 2008, the event allows geeks, gamers, and retro technology lovers to relive the nostalgia of multiplayer gaming in the early days of dial-up internet. In other words, everyone brings their own computer, and uses the LAN to play online games in the company of others. These parties are a lot of fun and add a more personal social element to the online gaming community.

At this year’s mHealth at Duke 2015 Conference, Dr. Lisa Hightow-Weidman discussed her current mHealth projects for HIV prevention. Chief among these projects is her work with Caktus Group on Epic Allies, a mobile gaming app that utilizes social media and mini-games to increase adherence to prescribed medication amongst HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM).

Last Friday everyone at Caktus set aside their regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for Caktus employees to take some time for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day saw everything from game development to Bokeh data visualization, Lego robots to superhero animation. Read more about the various projects from our Q2 2015 ShipIt Day.

Caktus has always pursued projects that make a difference in the world, particularly around HIV/AIDs. Now we’re hoping to provide a technology solution to a population that’s notoriously difficult to treat: teens and young adults living with HIV. They’re disproportionately impacted by new infections and, in the South in particular, those with HIV/AIDs have the lowest survival rates of any group living with the disease.

This October, nearly everyone at Caktus took a break from their usual projects to take part in Caktus’s 8th ShipIt Day. Apart from a few diligent individuals who couldn’t afford to spare any time from urgent responsibilities, nearly everyone took a break to work and collaborate on creative and experimental projects, with the aim of trying something new and ideally seeing a project through from start to finish in the space of a day and a half.

We’re pleased to announce that Caktus will be presenting Epic Allies, an mHealth Gamification App to improve ART drug adherence for HIV patients, at this year’s YTH Live in San Francisco.

The following is a press release posted in partnership with our team at UNC  and Duke.

The web application development company Caktus Group has teamed up with researchers at the UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases and the Duke Global Health Institute to develop a mobile phone app that may help patients better adhere to their medication regimens.