Python

Last Friday everyone at Caktus set aside their regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for Caktus employees to take some time for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day saw everything from game development to Bokeh data visualization, Lego robots to superhero animation. Read more about the various projects from our Q2 2015 ShipIt Day.

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

Sarah Bird’s talk made me excited to try the Bokeh tutorials. The Bokeh library has very approachable methods for creating data visualizations inside of Canvas elements all via Python. No javascript necessary. Who should see this talk? Python developers who want to add a beautiful data visualization to their websites without writing any javascript. Also, Django developers who would like to use QuerySets to create data visualizations should watch the entire video, and then rewind to minute 8:50 for instructions on how to use Django QuerySets with a couple of lines of code.

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

I think everyone who codes in any language and uses any automated PEP-8 or linter sort of code checker should watch this talk. Unfortunately to go into any detail on what I learned (or really was reminded of) would ruin the effect of actually watching the talk. I’d encourage everyone to watch it. I came away from the talk wanting to figure out a way to incorporate its lesson into our Caktus development practices.

Whether you couldn’t make it to PyCon this year, were busy attending one of the other amazing talks, or were simply too enthralled by the always popular “hallway track”, there are bound to be talks you missed out on. Thankfully, the PyCon staff does an amazing job not only organizing the conference for the attendees and the days of the conference, but also by producing recordings of all the talks for anyone who couldn’t attend. Even if you attended, you couldn’t have seen every talk, so these recordings are a great safety net.

Our Astro Code School is now officially accepting applications to its twelve-week Python & Django Web Development class for intermediate programmers! To kick off Astro’s opening, we asked Caktus’ CTO and co-founder Colin Copeland, who recently won a 2015 Triangle Business Journal 40 Under 40 Leadership Award, and Astro’s Director Brian Russell to reflect on the development of Astro as well as the role they see the school playing in the Django community.

Caktus co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Colin Copeland, is among an outstanding group of top business leaders to receive the Triangle Business Journal’s 2015 40 Under 40 Leadership Award. The award recognizes individuals for their remarkable contributions to their organizations and to the community.

Since moving to Durham in Fall 2014, we’ve been busy here at Caktus. We just finished renovating the first floor of our headquarters to bring the Triangle’s (and East Coast’s!) first Django and Python code school, Astro Code School. We’re proud to say that the school is now officially open and we’ll be celebrating with a public launch party on May 1st.

_{Image via Diamond Hacks Facebook Page}

This past weekend, Technical Director Mark Lavin came out to support DiamondHacks, NCSU’s first ever hackathon and conference event for women interested in computer science. Not only is NCSU Mark’s alma mater, but he’s also a strong supporter of co-organizer Girl Develop It RDU (GDI), of which Caktus is an official sponsor.

We’ve hit one of our greatest growth points yet in 2015, adding nine new team members since January to handle our increasing project load. There are many exciting things on the horizon for Caktus and our clients, so it’s wonderful to have a few more hands on deck.

I’m really happy to officially announce the first Python and Django Web Engineering class at Astro Code School. I’ll outline some details here and you can also find them on our classes page.