Caktus Blog

We’re honored to announce that we’ve won two W3 Silver Awards for Creative Excellence on the Web. The awards were given in recognition of our homepage redesign and DjangonCon 2014. Many thanks to Open Bastion and, by extension, the Django Software Foundation for selecting us to build the DjangoCon website. Also many thanks to our hardworking team of designers, developers and project managers that worked on these projects: Dan, Daryl, David, Michael, Rebecca, and Trevor!

Editor's note: This post was updated in September 2017.

Using Amazon S3 to Store your Django Site's Static and Media Files

Storing your Django site's static and media files on Amazon S3, instead of serving them yourself, can improve site performance. It frees your servers from handling static files themselves, lets you scale your servers easier by keeping media files in a common place, and is a necessary step to using Amazon CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Update: The live webcast is now available at O’Reilly Media

Our technical director, Mark Lavin, will be giving a tutorial on Django and Backbone.js during a free webcast for O’Reilly Media tomorrow, November 6th, 1pm EST. There will be demos and a discussion of common stumbling blocks when building rich client apps.

(Thanks to Mark Lavin for significant contributions to this post.)

In a previous post, we introduced using Celery to schedule tasks.

In this post, we address things you might need to consider when planning how to deploy Celery in production.

I have had the good fortune of working internationally on mobile health applications due to Caktus’ focus on public health. Our public health work often uses RapidSMS, a free and open-source Django powered framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology. I was able to work on two separate projects tracking data related to the 1000 days between a woman’s pregnancy and the child’s second birthday. Monitoring mothers and children during this time frame is critical as there are many factors that, when monitored properly, can decrease the mortality rates for both mother and child. Both of these projects presented interesting challenges and resulted in a number of takeaways worth further discussion.

Our client social impact projects continue here at Caktus, with work presently being done in Libya, Nigeria, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and the US. But every quarter, we pause to consider the excellent nonprofits that our employees volunteer for and, new this quarter, that they have identified as having a substantive influence on their lives. The following list represents employee-nominated nonprofits which we are giving to in alphabetical order:

Caktus had a great time at DjangoCon in Portland this year! We met up with old friends and new. The following staff gave talks (we’ll update this post with videos as soon as they’re available):

Update: Congratulations to @dmpayton for winning this giveaway!

Caktus is giving away a DjangoCon ticket valued at $850! DjangoCon is the main US Django conference and it’s returning to Portland this year, August 30 - September 4th. Meet fellow Django developers, learn what others are doing, and have a good time!

Caleb Smith recently gave a talk, “Intro to Celery,” at PyOhio (video below). Celery is a pretty popular topic for us here at Caktus. We use it often in our client work and find it very handy. So we were happy Caleb was out in the world, promoting its use. We sat down with him to hear more about PyOhio and Celery.

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.