Lightning Lunch Talk

Monthly, we organize short Lightning Talks that take place during the lunch hour here at Caktus. Not only does this allow us a wonderful excuse to have lunch delivered from one of our many local foodie options, but it’s an excellent chance to expand our knowledge on a variety of topics. Past talks have included everything from an introduction to synthesizers and other forms of electronic music, to bug fixing, to the design inspiration behind our PyCon 2015 site.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve won two Communicator Awards in this year’s 2015 Communicator Awards competition. With over 6000 entries received from across the US and around the world, the Communicator Awards is considered the largest and most competitive international awards program honoring creative excellence for communications professionals.

Leading the second talk of our Caktus Lightning Talk Lunch series, Calvin Spealman presented on the Service Page API:

The Service Page API is a prototype and proof of concept to deliver a wide range of browser plugins across multiple browsers and to extend the APIs available to websites a user visits by allowing plugins to extend the Javascript API with new libraries, integrate with external services, and more. It puts the power in the users hand to control which services can interact. This talk covers the problems with the current state of browser extensions and the difficulty in building them across multiple browsers consistently, and how the Service Page API is a solution to this, with code examples.

Last month we hosted the first talk in our new Caktus Lightning Talk Lunch series. We started this series to get together and learn about new projects, different applications, and interesting topics that the Caktus team has been working on. Lunch was provided from Buns in Chapel Hill and Mark Lavin gave the first talk.