How-To

At Caktus, we work on many projects, some of which are built by us from start to finish, while others are inherited from other sources. Oftentimes, we pick up a project that we either have not worked on in a long time, or haven’t worked on at all, so we have to get familiar with the code and figure out the design decisions that were made by those who developed it (including when the developers are younger versions of ourselves). Moreover, it is a good idea to improve the setup process in each project, so others can have an easier time getting set up in the future. In our efforts to work on such projects, a few things have been helpful both for becoming familiar with the projects more quickly, and for making the same projects easier to pick up in the future.

As part of our work to make sharp web apps at Caktus, we frequently create API endpoints that allow other software to interact with a server. Oftentimes this means using a frontend app (React, Vue, or Angular), though it could also mean connecting some other piece of software to interact with a server. A lot of our API endpoints, across projects, end up functioning in similar ways, so we have become efficient at writing them, and this blog post gives an example of how to do so.

It's been awhile since we last discussed bulk inserts on the Caktus blog. The idea is simple: if you have an application that needs to insert a lot of data into a Django model — for example a background task that processes a CSV file (or some other text file) — it pays to "chunk" those updates to the database so that multiple records are created through a single database operation. This reduces the total number of round-trips to the database, something my colleague Dan Poirier discussed in more detail in the post linked above.

In 2018, we published 44 posts on our blog, including technical how-to’s, a series on UX research methods, web development best practices, and tips for project management. Among all those posts, 18 rose to the top of the popularity list in 2018.

Sometimes we inherit code that doesn't follow the style guidelines we prefer when we're writing new code. We could just run flake8 on the whole codebase and fix everything before we continue, but that's not necessarily the best use of our time.

If you want to build a list page that allows filtering and pagination, you have to get a few separate things to work together. Django provides some tools for pagination, but the documentation doesn't tell us how to make that work with anything else. Similarly, django_filter makes it relatively easy to add filters to a view, but doesn't tell you how to add pagination (or other things) without breaking the filtering.

I recently looked into whether I could use pip-tools to improve my workflow around projects' Python dependencies. My conclusion was that pip-tools would help on some projects, but it wouldn't do everything I wanted, and I couldn't use it everywhere. (I tried pip-tools version 2.0.2 in August 2018. If there are newer versions, they might fix some of the things I ran into when trying pip-tools.)

Website experiences need to be consistent as much as they need to be well thought out and aesthetically pleasing. Structure, visual design, user interactions, and accessibility concerns are among many considerations that go into building quality websites. While achieving consistency of experience and implementation is an essential goal of web development, efficiency of execution is also very important. An efficient workflow means this consistent experience doesn’t require redoing work across the site.

Editor’s note: This post was written in 2018 when Django 1.11 and Django 2.0 were current. The code samples may need to be updated to work with more recent versions of Django.

Here at Caktus the front-end team stays on the bleeding edge by taking advantage of the latest and greatest tools. We only incorporate features into our packaging that are well-supported and production-ready, as well as those that meet our list of standard browser requirements. Luckily, there are plenty of tools that allow us to use experimental technologies with appropriate fallbacks for non-supported browsers.