Caktus Blog

We’re proud of our collaboration with Durham-based non-profit MDC to create the health insurance exchange alternative for North Carolina, NCGetCovered.org. The site was recently featured in the Herald-Sun. We’re excited to see our commitment to social good making an impact in our local community. Don’t forget the open enrollment deadline for health coverage is February 15th!

The Triangle Business Journal recognized Caktus’ work in the fight against HIV/AIDS in an important article discussing lower survival rates for those diagnosed with the disease in the southern United States. The article lauds our work on the medication adherence app Epic Allies as innovative in the effort to develop and maintain consistent medication habits for those living with HIV/AIDS.

We’re happy to announce that TriPython will be hosting their project nights at our new offices in Durham. This means now there’s a TriPython project night every single week, in every major Triangle city every month, on most weekdays. It’s great to see that the Triangle Python community has gotten so large.

The weekly Python e-mail newsletter, Pycoder’s Weekly included Caktus Developer Dan Poirier’s post, Celery in Production on their list of the best articles and projects of 2014! Take a look at their list and be sure to revisit Dan’s post.

The Triangle Business Journal recently featured Caktus’ addition of seven full-time jobs to the local economy. This growth is a direct result of increasing interest in Django powered web applications as well as a grant from the National Institutes of Health. It’s no secret we’re filling up our new Morris Street building with smart, sharp, passionate people.

Technology Tank, a communications and tech think tank, recently ranked their top 10 stories of 2014 and Caktus made the cut. Earlier this year, we shared a story about Libya’s SMS voter registration system. We’re happy to learn that other people were just as excited about our work enfranchising Libyan voters as we are! The list is based on number of visits to the story.

With Girl Develop It RDU, we celebrated the launch of Lightweight Django (O’Reilly) with the authors, Caktus Technical Director Mark Lavin and Caktus alum Julia Elman. Sylvia Richardson of Girl Develop It MCed. The event was open to the public and so popular we kept recounting the RSVPs and fretting over the fire code. But, phew, we were good. In attendance were friends, family, fellow Cakti, and Django fans from around the Triangle.

This October, nearly everyone at Caktus took a break from their usual projects to take part in Caktus’s 8th ShipIt Day. Apart from a few diligent individuals who couldn’t afford to spare any time from urgent responsibilities, nearly everyone took a break to work and collaborate on creative and experimental projects, with the aim of trying something new and ideally seeing a project through from start to finish in the space of a day and a half.

We’ve launched NCGetCovered.org, a site dedicated to helping North Carolinians gain access to health insurance. As many know, enrolling in health insurance can feel daunting. NCGetcovered.org aims to simplify that process by centralizing enrollment information and great resources like live help. The site is launching ahead of the November 15th open enrollment period for the federal healthcare exchange (healthcare.gov).

In exciting local news, Durham and Durham County are launching a new site dedicated to centralizing public data in Summer 2015. Their press release mentions a health sanitation app Code for Durham built as a model of civic engagement with open data. Our own co-founder and CTO, Colin Copeland, is co-captain of Code for Durham, a volunteer organization dedicated to building apps that improve government transparency.