Django

Caktus has been involved in quite a few projects (Libyan voter registration, UNICEF Project Mwana, and several others) that include text messaging (a.k.a. Short Message Service, or SMS), and we always use RapidSMS as one of our tools. We’ve also invested our own resources in supporting and extending RapidSMS.

My colleague Vinod recently found the answer on Stack Overflow to something that’s been bugging me for a long time - why do my Django logging configurations so often not do what I think they should?

One of the best ways to grow the Django community is to have more high-quality Django developers. The good news is that we’ve seen sharply increasing demand for Django web applications. The challenge that we and many other firms face is that there’s much higher demand than there is supply: there aren’t enough high-quality Django developers. We’ve talked about this issue intensely internally and with our friends while at DjangoCon and PyCon. We decided that we can offer at least one solution: a new Django-focused code school.

I love writing blog posts, and today I’m setting out to do something I’ve never tried before: write a blog post about writing blog posts. A big part of our mission at Caktus is to foster and help grow the Python and Django development communities, both locally and nationally. Part of how we’ve tried to accomplish this in the past is through hosting development sprints, sponsoring and attending conferences such as PyCon and DjangoCon, and building a knowledge base of common problems in Python and Django development in our blog. Many in the Django community first get to know Caktus through our blog, and it’s both gratifying and humbling when I meet someone at a conference and the person thanks me for a post Caktus wrote that helped him or her solve a technical problem at some point in the past.

Over the last two years Caktus’ design portfolio has rapidly been growing. We’ve taken on new projects primarily focused on design and have received community recognition for those efforts. We are happy to have grown our design capabilities to match the level of quality we demand from our Django developers. We have found it’s important to have strength on both sides of the table as each side challenges the other and forces the final product of our process to be as high quality as possible.

Technical Director Mark Lavin will be hosting a free O’Reilly webinar today at 4PM EST or 1PM PT on Testing Client-Side Applications with Django. Mark says testing is one of the most popular question topics he receives. It’s also a topic near and dear to Caktus’ quality-loving heart. Mark’s last webinar garnered more than 500 viewers, so sign up quick!

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.

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.