Python

At Caktus, “clean” (in addition to “working”!) code is an important part of our delivery. For all new projects, we achieve that by using flake8. flake8 is a wrapper around several tools: pep8, pyflakes, and McCabe. pep8 checks to make sure your code matches the PEP 0008 style guidelines, pyflakes looks for a few additional things like unused imports or variables, and McCabe raises warnings about overly complex sections of code.

We’re incredibly excited to announce the launch of Django Girls RDU, a group in NC’s Triangle region that hosts free one-day Django coding workshops for women. Django Girls is part of an international movement that’s helped 1,600 (and counting!) women learn how to code.

Note: In between the time I originally wrote this post and it getting published, a ticket and pull request were opened in Django to remove allow_unsaved_instance_assignment and move validation to the model save() method, which makes much more sense anyways. It's likely this will even be backported to Django 1.8.4. So, if you're using a version of Django that doesn't require this, hopefully you'll never stumble across this post in the first place! If this is still an issue for you, here's the original post:

As proud sponsors of PyCon, we hosted a one and a half hour free workshop. We see the workshops as a wonderful opportunity to share some practical, hands-on experience in our area of expertise: building applications in Django. In addition, it’s a way to give back to the open source community.

Last Friday marked another ShipIt Day at Caktus, a chance for our employees to set aside client work for experimentation and personal development. It’s always a wonderful chance for our developers to test new boundaries, learn new skills and sometimes even build something entirely new in a single day.

Part six of six in our PyCon 2015 Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff enjoyed at PyCon.

I’ve had an interest in robotics since high school, but always thought it would be expensive and time consuming to actually do. Over the past few years, though, I’ve observed the rise of open hardware such as the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, and modules and kits built on top of them, that make this type of project more affordable and accessible to the casual hobbyist. I was excited by Katherine’s talk because Robot Operating System (ROS) seems to do for the software side what Arduino and such do for the hardware side.

I had the opportunity to give a webcast for O’Reilly Media during which I encountered a presenter’s nightmare: a broken demo. Worse than that it was a test failure in a presentation about testing. Is there any way to salvage such an epic failure?

This past Saturday, Caktus developer Rebecca Conley taught a 4-hour introductory level workshop in Django hosted by PyLadies RDU. PyLadies RDU is the local chapter of an international mentorship group for women who love coding in Python. Their main focus is to empower women to become more active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community.

This is Caktus’ first year taking part in the Catholic Relief Service’s (CRS) Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) conference. The theme of this year’s conference is increasing the impact of aid and development tools through innovation. We’re especially looking forward to all of the speakers from organizations like the International Rescue Committee, USAID, World Vision, and the American Red Cross. In fact, the offerings are so vast, we thought we would provide a little cheat sheet to help you find Cakti throughout this year’s conference.

Part five of six in our PyCon 2015 Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff enjoyed at PyCon.

From Ryan Kelly’s talk I learned that it is actually possible, today, to run Python in a web browser (not something that interprets Python-like syntax and translates it into JavaScript, but an actual Python interpreter!). PyPy.js combines two technologies, PyPy (the Python interpreter written in Python) and Emscripten (an LLVM-to-JavaScript converter, typically used for getting games running in the browser), to run PyPy in the browser. This talk is a must-see for anyone who’s longed before to write client-side Python instead of JavaScript for a web app. While realistically being able to do this in production may still be a ways off, at least in part due to the multiple megabytes of JavaScript one needs to download to get it working, I enjoyed the view Ryan’s talk provided into the internals of this project. PyPy itself is always fascinating, and this talk made it even more so.