Python

_{Image via Diamond Hacks Facebook Page}

This past weekend, Technical Director Mark Lavin came out to support DiamondHacks, NCSU’s first ever hackathon and conference event for women interested in computer science. Not only is NCSU Mark’s alma mater, but he’s also a strong supporter of co-organizer Girl Develop It RDU (GDI), of which Caktus is an official sponsor.

We’ve hit one of our greatest growth points yet in 2015, adding nine new team members since January to handle our increasing project load. There are many exciting things on the horizon for Caktus and our clients, so it’s wonderful to have a few more hands on deck.

I’m really happy to officially announce the first Python and Django Web Engineering class at Astro Code School. I’ll outline some details here and you can also find them on our classes page.

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.

Caktus is giving away a PyCon 2015 ticket, valued at $350. We love going to PyCon every year. It’s the largest gathering of developers using Python, the open source programming language that Caktus relies on. This year, it’ll be held April 8th-16th at the beautiful Palais des congrès de Montréal (the inspiration we used to design the website).

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.

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.