Python

For DjangoCon 2015, Jeff Bradberry created an A.I. for our booth game, Ultimate Tic Tac Toe. Reprinted here from jeffbradberry.com is his explanation of the Monte Carlo Tree Search used to build the A.I.

Having helped to design an award-winning event site for last year’s PyCon in Montreal, we are thrilled to collaborate again with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) on this year’s site for PyCon 2016.

At Caktus, “clean” (in addition to “working”!) code is an important part of our delivery. For all new projects, we achieve that by using flake8. flake8 is a wrapper around several tools: pep8, pyflakes, and McCabe. pep8 checks to make sure your code matches the PEP 0008 style guidelines, pyflakes looks for a few additional things like unused imports or variables, and McCabe raises warnings about overly complex sections of code.

We’re incredibly excited to announce the launch of Django Girls RDU, a group in NC’s Triangle region that hosts free one-day Django coding workshops for women. Django Girls is part of an international movement that’s helped 1,600 (and counting!) women learn how to code.

Note: In between the time I originally wrote this post and it getting published, a ticket and pull request were opened in Django to remove allow_unsaved_instance_assignment and move validation to the model save() method, which makes much more sense anyways. It's likely this will even be backported to Django 1.8.4. So, if you're using a version of Django that doesn't require this, hopefully you'll never stumble across this post in the first place! If this is still an issue for you, here's the original post:

As proud sponsors of PyCon, we hosted a one and a half hour free workshop. We see the workshops as a wonderful opportunity to share some practical, hands-on experience in our area of expertise: building applications in Django. In addition, it’s a way to give back to the open source community.

Last Friday marked another ShipIt Day at Caktus, a chance for our employees to set aside client work for experimentation and personal development. It’s always a wonderful chance for our developers to test new boundaries, learn new skills and sometimes even build something entirely new in a single day.

Part six of six in our PyCon 2015 Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff enjoyed at PyCon.

I’ve had an interest in robotics since high school, but always thought it would be expensive and time consuming to actually do. Over the past few years, though, I’ve observed the rise of open hardware such as the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, and modules and kits built on top of them, that make this type of project more affordable and accessible to the casual hobbyist. I was excited by Katherine’s talk because Robot Operating System (ROS) seems to do for the software side what Arduino and such do for the hardware side.

I had the opportunity to give a webcast for O’Reilly Media during which I encountered a presenter’s nightmare: a broken demo. Worse than that it was a test failure in a presentation about testing. Is there any way to salvage such an epic failure?

This past Saturday, Caktus developer Rebecca Conley taught a 4-hour introductory level workshop in Django hosted by PyLadies RDU. PyLadies RDU is the local chapter of an international mentorship group for women who love coding in Python. Their main focus is to empower women to become more active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community.