Caktus Blog

In March 2020, with the first wave of the coronavirus hitting the US, Caktus sent all its employees home. One year later, with working from home still in effect, our days punctuated by virtual meetings via Google Hangouts and chats via Slack, our co-founders decided it was time to connect in another way.

PyCon US 2021 will be completely virtual this year. For the first time ever you’ll be able to enjoy this popular event from the comfort of your favorite armchair!

In Part 1 of this blog series, we started looking at how we can use mocking to improve our unit tests. We'll expand on that in this post.

Last year, Apple announced that they would transition their entire Mac line from Intel processors to their ARM64 Apple Silicon chip called the M1. Several weeks ago, I started testing development on MacBook Air with the Apple M1 chip (pictured above).

We've written in the past about the importance of unit tests and how to write better ones: Culture of Unit Testing, Subtests are the Best.

Have you heard of Jerry Lawson or Kimberly Bryant? No? You’re not the only one … I hadn’t either, until earlier this month. Both of them are trailblazers in the tech industry, who we’re recognizing as part of our celebration of Black History Month.

The year 2021 is upon us, and February is a fine month to kick off a long-term culture of learning and celebration of the contributions of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to our collective history! One of the most pervasive and enduring contributions of Black people to world culture is through rhythm and sound.

Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash

Like many conferences in 2020, DjangoCon Europe was held virtually. I’m glad I had the opportunity to attend because the sessions provided insight and information that I’m still applying. In light of the pandemic and the social changes it’s caused, I’ve come to know that web development and the solutions it provides are at the heart of how we are navigating this challenging time. Here are three talks from DjangoCon Europe that I believe will help you protect, maintain, and develop projects.

At Caktus, we maintain some open source packages, which are usually pieces of code that we’ve found useful when building an application, and we figure they might be useful to others. From time to time, those open source projects need a little maintenance: Maybe a bug fix has been provided from a community member, or we need to update to support a new version of Python or Django. I always hesitate to do this because I know there are multiple steps involved to ensure that any updates are properly tested, documented, versioned, and released. One of my silly blockers is that I always seem to forget how to upload a release to PyPI, which is the Python Package Index, a repository of software for Python. I call it silly because it shouldn’t really be a blocker, seeing how simple it actually is, but I still forget it each time and have to walk through the documentation step by step to make sure I do it properly. I recently found a tool that helps with this process.

I remember being really impressed the first time I encountered single sign-on (SSO), in which I could access multiple websites after just logging in once. But I was even more impressed when I learned that underlying SSO are just a few, basic HTTP features.