Open Source

FastCompany named Caktus client, UNICEF, as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Local. UNICEF received this honor for their launch of RapidSMS, an open source platform for quickly building SMS applications.

Colin Copeland, Managing Member at Caktus, has wrapped up work, supported by UNICEF, as the Community Coordinator for the open source RapidSMS project. RapidSMS is a text messaging application development library built on top of the Django web framework. It creates a SMS provider agnostic way of sending and receiving text messages. RapidSMS has been used widely in the mobile health field, in particular in areas where internet access cannot be taken for granted and cell phones are the best communication tool available. This has included projects initiated by UNICEF country offices in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Back in March, at PyCon 2013, the PSF provided each attendee with a Raspberry Pi, a tiny credit-card sized computer meant to be paired with the Python programming language. The power and portability of the Raspberry Pi has stimulated an explosion of interest among hobbyists and educators. Their uses seem to be limited only by our collective imagination.

On Wednesday, Mark and Julia are teaming up to deliver their talk "Developers + Designers: Collaborating on your Open Source project " at OSCON 2013. We’re thrilled that their talk got accepted and know that they have a lot to contribute to the Open Source conversation which too often lacks the voice of designers. Julia and Mark will be discussing how it is important to start collaborating early on your ideas before writing code. We’re happy to have such adept developers and designers here at Caktus pushing each other to work outside of their strict job titles and collaborate to build projects that couldn’t be built anywhere else. If you are at OSCON this week, stop by and hear Mark and Julia’s talk. Or, if you miss their talk, they will be around all week and are excited about meeting new people.

We had our 2nd ShipIt Day at Caktus last week. ShipIt (coined by Atlassian), in case you don’t know, is an exercise that allows your team to work on alternative projects in a 24-hour hackathon. We brainstorm ideas related to Caktus, break into small groups and try to build a project by the end of the day on Friday. It’s a lot of fun and provides an opportunity to work on internal tools, try something new and collaborate together. \

We manage a number of open source Django apps here at Caktus. While many of us here are proficient in a number of programming languages, the same can’t be said for our ability to read or write in languages other than English. The Django community is global and we want our apps to support other languages. For that we’ve turned to Transifex which it the same tool Django itself uses for translations.

django-scribbler is a new open-source project published by the team at Caktus. Its goal is to create a seamless way for authorized end users to make edits to specific blocks of content in their Django template.

I'm delighted to write that last Friday, we announced we'll be trying our first "ShipIt Day" at Caktus in October. ShipIt Days, also known as FedEx Days, provide a time for the team to set aside what occupies us most days—building fantastic web applications using Python and Django for our wonderful clients—and pick up something new or scratch an itch that's been bugging us for awhile. We got the idea from the book Drive by Daniel Pink, and it was also suggested independently by a number of team members.

The Caktus team arrived in DC for Djangocon on Monday evening, 9/3 and I've been keeping notes about what the presenters have been discussing and generally what the mood and experience have been like. I am taking a few minutes out of my Tuesday schedule to share with everyone how Djangocon 2012 is shaping up! I stayed in Track 1 throughout the day, so I can only report on talks given there.

Caktus is proud to announce that four of our developers will be presenting at this year’s DjangoCon. We are also happy to announce that we will be sponsors of DjangoCon, taking place in Washington D.C. on September 4th through the 7th. In addition to the four Caktus team members who will be presenting this year, our entire development staff will be in attendance enjoying the conference and city.