Django

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.

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!

Mark Lavin, Caktus Technical Director and author of the forthcoming LightWeight Django was recently at OSCON 2014 in Portland where he gave a talk on improving the relationship between server and client for REST APIs. OSCON, with over 3000 attendees, is one of the largest open source conferences around. I sat down with him to ask him about his time there.

Recently Caktus collaborated with the organizers of PyOhio, a free regional Python conference, to launch the PyOhio 2014 conference website. The conference starts this weekend, July 26 - 27. As in prior years, the conference web site utilizes Eldarion’s Symposion, an opensource conference management system. Symposion powers a number of annual conference sites including PyCon and DjangoCon. In fact, as of this writing, there are 78 forks of Symposion, a nod to its widespread use for events both large and small. This collaboration afforded us the opportunity to abide by one our core tenets, that of giving back to the community.

This past Friday we celebrated another ShipIt day at Caktus. There was a lot of open source contribution, exploring, and learning happening in the office. The projects ranged from native mobile Firefox OS apps, to development on our automated server provisioning templates via Salt, to front-end apps aimed at using web technology to create interfaces where composing new music or performing Frozen’s Let It Go is so easy anyone can do it.