Liza Chabot
Monthly, we organize short Lightning Talks that take place during the lunch hour here at Caktus. Not only does this allow us a wonderful excuse to have lunch delivered from one of our many local foodie options, but it’s an excellent chance to expand our knowledge on a variety of topics. Past talks have included everything from an introduction to synthesizers and other forms of electronic music, to bug fixing, to the design inspiration behind our PyCon 2015 site.
This month, we had two talks on organizational tools for project management and resource sorting. Developer Dan Poirier gave a brief talk on Pinboard, or, as he fondly refers to it, “social bookmarking for introverts.” Essentially, Pinboard is a database for storing, organizing, and sharing links and bookmarks to articles and pages on the web. Though lacking in sharp design or beautiful layout, Pinboard is useful, highly functional, and extremely intuitive. Dan was a wonderful guide in walking us through how he uses Pinboard to store development tips and articles, as well as information related to his various projects for Caktus. He even built his own front-end for the site to help organize his finds for daily use and to share with other Caktus developers.
Our second talk came from Game Designers Edward and Lucas Rowe, who are currently finishing up the work on our Epic Allies app. Before this project, Caktus wanted to try out a new management tool for development; Epic Allies turned out to be a good fit for testing JIRA, the issue and project tracking software from Atlassian. In their talk, Lucas and Edward took us on a tour of JIRA, discussed its functionality for development projects, and showed us how Epic Allies specifically used this highly customizable platform.
All in all it was an informative day, and Dan, Edward, and Lucas may have all won a few converts to their favorite organizational tools. Now we can’t wait to see what’s in the pipeline for our next set of Lightning Talks!
