Mark Lavin is the Technical Director at Caktus Consulting Group in Carrboro, NC where he builds scalable web applications with Django. Mark is current writing "Lightweight Django" along with Julia Elman for O'Reilly Media which is set to be completed this fall. He maintains a number of open source projects primarily related to Django development and frequently contributes back to projects he uses. When he isn't programming, Mark enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, running, and brewing beer.