Training

I recently completed a three-month internship with Caktus Group. This is a major accomplishment for me because two years ago, to the day, I was working as a consultant in the education services industry. I was inspired to pursue a career in web development after I came across a six-month course teaching full-stack Javascript. In sharing my experience, I hope to shed light on what it’s like working as an intern at Caktus, and give professionals looking to transition into web development some advice that may be useful once they land an entry-level position. In general, my experience felt a little like this:

A few weeks ago, Rebecca Conley attended DjangoCon Europe 2016 in Budapest, Hungary. The event is a five-day conference that brings together Django lovers from all over the world to learn about and share each other’s experiences with Django.

For the past couple months, we’ve been working on a new white paper, “Shipping Faster: Django Team Improvements”. We examined our existing processes, looked at best practices, and considered what has or hasn’t worked across our dozens of simultaneous projects.

Quite often, people undertake internships at the beginning of their career. For me, it was a mid-career direction change and a leap of faith. In order to facilitate this career move, I took a Rails Engineering class at The Iron Yard in the fall of 2014. I had limited experience as a developer and no experience in Django prior to my internship at Caktus. Because of the structure and support Caktus provided and my enthusiasm for becoming a developer, my internship turned out to be the ideal way for me to make the transition from a novice to a professional developer.

Caleb Smith, a developer at Caktus, will be guest lecturing tomorrow to the inaugral class at the Iron Yard in Durham. Iron Yard is a code school that trains its students in modern programming practices and prepares them for immediate hiring upon graduation. Tobias, our CEO, is on the school’s employer advisory board. Caleb will be speaking on his experience as a Python developer. As an exclusive Python shop, we here at Caktus naturally think it’s the best language for new students–28 of the top 30 universities agree.

One of Caktus’ most pedagogically focused developers, Caleb Smith, will be teaching a class to a group of local budding Pythonistas tomorrow, Saturday 26th, and Caktus’ Rebecca Lovewell will be contributing as a teaching assistant. You can read more about it, and sign up via the meetup page for the event. The class is run by the local chapter of Girl Develop It, a group focused on improving the landscape of women in tech via women focused (but not exclusive) educational opportunities.

Caktus is proud to announce that we are now offering Django training services. This new service includes both off and on-site training for you and your team to become a Djangonaut.

On June 8th and 9th, Caktus hosted its first Django Fundamentals Bootcamp. The Caktus team developed the idea for the course, which was a crossword drill application, and has been developing the structure and content of the course over the past year. The bootcamp was designed to teach programmers who have experience in programming with different languages and introduce them to the fundamentals of building a web application with Django. We created an interactive environment where the instructors and students were able to communicate with one another which solved the issue of how to begin developing in an unfamiliar language.

I’m excited to announce that on June 9th and 10th, Caktus will be hosting our first Django bootcamp. It will be a two day intensive bootcamp session where you’ll learn the basics of developing a web application using Django through constructing a crossword drill application, created by the Caktus staff. It will go over the architecture of Django and also different third party applications that will allow you to enhance the finished product. For more information regarding our bootcamp, you can check out the schedule of the day’s events.