Learning

In March 2020, with the first wave of the coronavirus hitting the US, Caktus sent all its employees home. One year later, with working from home still in effect, our days punctuated by virtual meetings via Google Hangouts and chats via Slack, our co-founders decided it was time to connect in another way.

Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash

Like many conferences in 2020, DjangoCon Europe was held virtually. I’m glad I had the opportunity to attend because the sessions provided insight and information that I’m still applying. In light of the pandemic and the social changes it’s caused, I’ve come to know that web development and the solutions it provides are at the heart of how we are navigating this challenging time. Here are three talks from DjangoCon Europe that I believe will help you protect, maintain, and develop projects.

I keep up with what's happening in my field by following a number of blogs and an occasional email list. I don't read everything posted in all of these, but by scanning the topics in a feed reader, I can keep up with what's going on, without wasting a lot of time.

I enjoyed working through the book Creating GUI Applications with wxPython by Michael Driscoll, learning various techniques for programming GUI applications in Python using wxPython.

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

You may look at my job title (or picture) and think, “Oh, this is easy, he’s going to resolve to stand up at his desk more.” Well, you’re not wrong, that is one of my resolutions, but I have an even more important one. I, Jeremy Gibson, resolve to do less work in 2019. You’re probably thinking that it’s bold to admit this on my employer’s blog. Again, you’re not wrong, but I think I can convince them that the less work I do, the more clear and functional my code will become. My resolution has three components.

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.

I ask a lot of questions as a developer. Some of them have been more basic, like ‘How do I import a Python function from one file into another?’, and some more complex, like ‘How should we take an API request and return a dynamically-generated PDF as a response?’