Open Source

International Open Data Day is this weekend, February 21st and 22nd. As part of the festivities, Code for America is hosting its 4th annual CodeAcross. The event aims to unite developers across the country for a day of civic coding, creating tools that make government services simple, effective, easy to use. Put simply, “the goal of CodeAcross is to activate the Code for America network and inspire residents everywhere to get actively involved in their community.”

Brian Curtis, the director of the Python Software Foundation, recently interviewed and featured Caktus on the PyCon website. PyCon is the premiere event for those of us within the Python and Django open source communities. Brian writes about our work designing the PyCon 2015 website, our efforts in Libya, and what’s on the horizon in 2015. We’re excited about this recognition!

I love writing blog posts, and today I’m setting out to do something I’ve never tried before: write a blog post about writing blog posts. A big part of our mission at Caktus is to foster and help grow the Python and Django development communities, both locally and nationally. Part of how we’ve tried to accomplish this in the past is through hosting development sprints, sponsoring and attending conferences such as PyCon and DjangoCon, and building a knowledge base of common problems in Python and Django development in our blog. Many in the Django community first get to know Caktus through our blog, and it’s both gratifying and humbling when I meet someone at a conference and the person thanks me for a post Caktus wrote that helped him or her solve a technical problem at some point in the past.

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.

I have had the good fortune of working internationally on mobile health applications due to Caktus’ focus on public health. Our public health work often uses RapidSMS, a free and open-source Django powered framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology. I was able to work on two separate projects tracking data related to the 1000 days between a woman’s pregnancy and the child’s second birthday. Monitoring mothers and children during this time frame is critical as there are many factors that, when monitored properly, can decrease the mortality rates for both mother and child. Both of these projects presented interesting challenges and resulted in a number of takeaways worth further discussion.

Mark Lavin, Caktus Technical Director and author of the forthcoming LightWeight Django was recently at OSCON 2014 in Portland where he gave a talk on improving the relationship between server and client for REST APIs. OSCON, with over 3000 attendees, is one of the largest open source conferences around. I sat down with him to ask him about his time there.

Code reviews are one of those things that everyone agrees are worthwhile, but sometimes don’t get done. A good way to keep getting the benefits of code reviews is to establish, and even nurture, a culture of code reviews.

This past Friday we celebrated another ShipIt day at Caktus. There was a lot of open source contribution, exploring, and learning happening in the office. The projects ranged from native mobile Firefox OS apps, to development on our automated server provisioning templates via Salt, to front-end apps aimed at using web technology to create interfaces where composing new music or performing Frozen’s Let It Go is so easy anyone can do it.

Karen Tracey, a Django core committer and Caktus Lead Developer and Technical Manager, recently participated in TriLUG’s panel on Women in Free and/or Open Source Software. Karen was one of five female developers who discussed challenges women face in joining the open source community. We recently caught up with Karen to discuss her own experience.

Colin Copeland, our Chief Technology Officer, recently spoke to WNCN about a new web application, NCFoodInspector.com, that lets Durham County visitors know the cleanliness of nearby restaurants. Colin helped build the application in his spare time as captain of Code for Durham Brigade, an all-volunteer group dedicated to using technology to improve access to publicly available sanitation scores. The group leverages open source technology to build applications.