Django

I recently decided I wanted to understand better what Cross-Site Scripting and Cross-Site Request Forgery were, and how they compared to that classic vulnerability, SQL Injection.

Even Python learning materials that get into very advanced language features rarely mention some practical things that would be very helpful to know as soon as you start working on more serious projects, like:

During the past two presidential debates, moderators from ABC and Fox asked candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump voter-submitted questions from PresidentialOpenQuestions.com. The site, created by the bipartisan Open Debate Coalition (ODC) with the support of Caktus Group, is built on top of the open source Django web framework.

This ShipIt day marks four years of ShipIt days at Caktus! We had a wide range of projects that people came together to build. Most importantly, we all had fun and learned through actively working on the projects. People explored new technologies and tools, and had a chance to dig a bit deeper into items that piqued their interest in their regular work.

The Celery library (previous posts) makes it as easy to schedule a task to run later as calling a function. Just change:

We had a great time at the inaugural PyData Carolinas hosted nearby at IBM in the Research Triangle Park. People from Caktus presented a number of talks and the videos are now up online:

Tomorrow marks the official beginning of PyData Carolinas 2016 (though technically, the tutorials started today). This is the first time PyData has hosted a conference in our area. We’re especially proud of the way local leaders and members of meetups like TriPython, TechGirlz, Girl Develop It RDU, and PyLadies have worked in tandem to put this event together for the Python community.

We finished up last week with another successful ShipIt Day. ShipIt Days are quarterly events where we put down client work for a little bit and focus on learning, stretching ourselves, and sharing. Everyone chooses to work together or individually on an itch or a project that has been on the back of their mind for the last few months. This time, we stretched ourselves by trying out new frameworks, languages, and pluggable apps. Here are some of the projects we worked on during ShipIt Day:

Caktus is headed to Philadelphia for our seventh DjangoCon. We’re Gold Sponsors this year, so definitely come by our booth to chat with our team and grab t-shirts, stickers, and a 40% off coupon for Lightweight Django, co-written by our technical director, Mark Lavin. Also be sure to enter our raffle for an Amazon Echo.

The Django 1.8 release added support for complex query expressions. The documentation has some nice examples but they don't do justice to how crazy awesome these are. In this post, we will go through some additional examples of how to leverage these expressions.