Caktus Blog

What is it like to be an intern at Caktus? I am finishing up as the spring Django intern (though I didn’t actually use any Django), so I’ll share my experience.

Our love for Python is no secret. But with so many modules, tools, and libraries, it can be overwhelming for beginning developers to identify the most useful. Obviously, our favorite framework is Django. But we’re setting aside our undying love for that framework for a moment to offer a list of other helpful Python libraries. From those offering standard solutions to everyday programming problems, to ones that hold a special place in the heart of the dev who created them, these are some of our developer’s favorite tools for Python development.

The web development community has a habit of declaring “firsts” those practices and approaches that reach some ill-defined status signaling they are the go-to way to solve a particular problem. We’ve seen “mobile first” and, more recently, “offline first.” In these examples, a new problem comes along and as that problem grows more common there comes a tipping point. On the other side of that tipping point, it begins to make sense to solve the problem from the ground up, rather than building a project and solving it as an afterthought.

My first Caktus project went live late in the summer of 2015. It's a community portal for users of an SMS-based product called RapidPro. The portal was built in the Wagtail CMS framework which has a lovely, intuitive admin interface and excellent documentation for developers and content editors. The code for our Wagtail-based project is all open sourced on GitHub.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in February 2016 and was updated in August 2017 to incorporate improvements suggested by our readers. It has also been tested for compatibility as of the Django 1.11 release.

Last Friday, the Cakti set aside regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance 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 cat animations to improvements on our Taylor Swift lyric generator app. Read about the various ShipIt Day projects for Q1 of 2016 below.

Republished with permission from ICTWorks.org

At the recent MERL Tech conference, Tania Lee (Caktus Group), Tom Walker (Engine Room), Laura Walker McDonald (SIMLab), and Lynnae Day (Oxfam America) led a session called, “The Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs of Choosing an M&E Platform.” They’ve written up their reflections and learning from that session focusing on project design, tool design/research, and getting things off the ground, whether that means finding external help or building a custom solution.

Hierarchical data are everywhere, from product catalogs to blog post comments. A classic example is the tree of life, where kingdoms are subdivided into a hierarchy of phylum and class down to genus and species. What if you wish to store this data in a database table, which is inherently flat? Databases do not natively store hierarchies, so you need to work around that.

This year we had the pleasure of building a number of unique solutions for several organizations. In addition, we had the support of these clients to open source the tools we built. By open sourcing our work, we enable others to use, replicate, and even improve upon the tools we’ve created.

My name is Ben Phillips and I am Caktus’ Open Source Fellow. As my fellowship comes to a close, I wanted to reflect on my time at Caktus and to share my experience and some of what I’ve learned here. First, however, I should probably share how I ended up here in the first place.