Jenny Farver joins 8th Light as co-CEO
I’m very happy to announce that Jenny Farver has joined 8th Light as co-CEO. We are at an exciting point in our company’s history, and Jenny brings experience and perspective that will be invaluable as...
View ArticleSimple Ways to Make an Impact
Software engineering can be incredibly complex. There are a variety of tools, software patterns, architectural decisions, and process flows. This can be daunting for a new engineer who wants to make an...
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A Case Study in Vim Script 101: Making a Test Runner
"Hello there, what's this?" you ask. It's a case study in how one might use Vim script, a programming language built in to Vim. We'll walk through the creation of a Vim script from stem to stern,...
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Dependency Injection in React
Dependency injection is a form of inversion of control. This means that a component’s dependencies are not part of a component’s internals, they are defined at the public-facing seam, or interface, of...
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SQL, JSON, and Domain Objects
SQL databases are amazing. They give you tools to create extremely powerful guarantees about the integrity of your data, evolve that data over time, and ask some pretty complex questions about it with...
View ArticleJon Wettersten joins 8th Light as Head of Design
8th Light is pleased to announce that it has greatly advanced its mission to be the partner of choice for ambitious software development projects by hiring Jon Wettersten to be its new Head of...
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Learning to Learn With Metacognition
Software is a complex and ever evolving domain. As software developers, this means that, in order to stay on top of changes in the field, we need to be learning all the time. Certainly we owe it to our...
View ArticleThe World's Your Stage: An Interview with Senior Crafter Ian Carroll
8th Light’s modern apprenticeship program allows us to hire software professionals from a wide range of backgrounds, and Ian Carroll is no exception. In an interview with apprenticeship.io, a...
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In Slack, no one can hear your scream!
Hey, my name’s Ian. I’m a Senior Consulting Software Engineer at 8th Light’s Pod Services division. And I have struggled with remote collaboration for a long time.Before the pandemic, I struggled with...
View ArticleContinuous compliance on AWS
A looming deadline. A long list of requirements handed off to the team without their input. No room for flexibility. Just one shot to get it right.You may be thinking of a doomed software project from...
View ArticleIntroducing 8th Light's Board of Directors for 2021
We founded 8th Light to be a place where our philosophy of approaching software as a craft could thrive. As we’ve grown and evolved, this has led us to evaluate tradeoffs and make decisions that...
View ArticleStatic Site Deploy Previews on AWS
There are tons of options out there for deploying websites, but my default approach for years has been: dump it in an S3 bucket with CloudFront in front.There's a big assumption and scope narrowing...
View ArticleMinimally Privileged Terraform
By default, every newly created AWS resource lacks permission to perform any actions. AWS strongly recommends following the security practice of granting least privilege, i.e. the minimum set of...
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A Color Coded Guide to Ports and Adapters
Ports and Adapters is an architecture pattern that aims to decouple your application from the details. By details here, I mean things like:Your web framework of choiceYour database of choiceYour...
View ArticleSix Tips For A Successful Job Interview
Job interviews are an inescapable reality of the labor market, and unfortunately they’re still an imperfect science. Different companies will have different qualities they’re looking for in a...
View ArticleLife after Moment.js
As of September 2020, Moment.js—probably the most popular JavaScript library for handling dates—became a legacy project in maintenance mode. As the Moment team explained: It is not dead, but it is...
View ArticleIntroducing Collaborative Craft, a new podcast by 8th Light
We're excited to introduce our brand new podcast, Collaborative Craft. The trailer is available now wherever you listen to podcasts.We call Collaborative Craft a "love letter to curiosity." We're...
View ArticlePodcast: How Design Works with Jon Wettersten
What is design? What makes a designer? Big questions require big answers and Thomas and Jerome found the most overqualified person they could: Jon Wettersten, Head of Design at 8th Light. In the...
View ArticlePodcast: Tech's Pre-seatbelt Phase, with Eva PenzeyMoog
When we think of technology breaches, we often imagine a nefarious hacker behind a computer screen far away. But for survivors of domestic violence and abuse, the most common perpetrators of invasive...
View ArticlePodcast: Stealing Fire: Ambitious Side Projects with Kofi Gumbs
Many programmers settle into a work-life balance where their day job pays their bills and their side projects fuel their passions. UI programmer Kofi Gumbs sees his side projects as opportunities to...
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