Caktus Blog

Twice in the last few months we’ve had to deal with Django production site issues caused by inefficient search queries.

DjangoCon US 2025 was a milestone year for the community, as we gathered in Chicago to celebrate 20 years of Django. Attendees from around the world came together to learn about the latest developments, share their work, and strengthen the bonds that make DjangoCon such a special event. Caktus was well-represented once again, with our team contributing as organizers, speakers, and active participants throughout the week.

For some time now, we’ve been using tools like ChatGPT and CoPilot for day-to-day tasks, but mostly through the conversational AI chatbots they provide. We’ve used them for everything from drafting emails to providing type-ahead coding assistance. We haven’t, however, gone a step further and integrated them into a development project. Honestly, we weren’t sure where to start. Looking into the available options, you quickly run into a dozen new concepts, from vector stores to agents, and different SDKs that all seem to solve similar problems.

Introduction

In this post, we’ll explain how we extended our existing AWS CloudFormation infrastructure, built using Troposphere, to support the use of Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) for Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) nodes. This migration was necessary to ensure compatibility ahead of our planned upgrade to Kubernetes version 1.33.

At Caktus, many of our projects use pip-tools for dependency management. Following Tobias’ post How to Migrate your Python & Django Projects to uv, we were looking to migrate other projects to uv, but the path seemed less clear with existing pip-tools setups. Our requirements are often spread across multiple files, like this:

We recently moved this website from Django to a static website made using Hugo, and decided to use Cloudflare Pages to deploy it. Cloudflare Pages offers automatic deployments, meaning it can automatically build and deploy a website when changes are pushed to a GitHub branch. This is simple to set up and works well. However, we wanted to build and deploy using GitHub Actions instead, so that the build logs would be easily accessible on GitHub. Cloudflare’s wrangler-action makes it simple to set up a GitHub Actions workflow for this.

What Is Open Source?

Open source software is publicly available code that anyone can use, modify, and improve. It’s the foundation of much of the modern internet and it’s trusted by global enterprises, startups, nonprofits, and government agencies alike.

This Tuesday (tomorrow!), August 12th, we’re teaming up with TriPython to host an informal Django Birthday event at Boxyard RTP in Durham.

As part of our ongoing Sustainability and Maintenance efforts, we are upgrading our Kubernetes clusters to version 1.32. Much like a major Django upgrade, this process requires us to update other key components to ensure they remain compatible. One of these is the ingress-nginx controller, which manages external access to the cluster.

Working with timezones can sometimes lead to confusing results, especially when combining Django's ORM, raw SQL for performance (like in PostgreSQL materialized views), and specific timezone requirements. I recently had an issue while aggregating traffic stop data by year, where all yearly calculations needed to reflect the 'America/New_York' (EST/EDT) timezone, even though our original data contained timestamp with time zone fields. We were using django-pgviews-redux to manage materialized views, and I mistakenly attempted to apply timezone logic to a date field that had no time or timezone information.