What Matters When Designing For Safety?
My first book, Design for Safety, is now available for purchase!This book is the culmination of more than 10 years of work. Before joining the tech field, I worked in the non-profit space and...
View ArticleSargable Queries & MUL Indexes; or Why My Query is Slow
You're on Ops. Debugging Error-s in Invoicing Rails app, as usual. They're stored in MySQL, and accessed through ActiveRecord and some helper methods. They've already been updated with a...
View ArticlePodcast: It's a Process: More than Machine Learning with Hana Lee
“You can build an initial model, but you have to keep updating it. You have to continually operate it, doing things incrementally rather than trying to solve the whole problem in one go. One of the...
View ArticlePodcast: Know Your History: Ethical Source with Coraline Ehmke
Coraline Ehmke’s path to the tech industry was non-traditional. It took someone to turn the key for her to find the community that she sought. 25 years later, Coraline is still working in tech and has...
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Documenting User Flows in FigJam
Recently, I've come to discover the power and beauty of using FigJam as a way of defining user stories. For whatever reason, I hadn't spent a ton of time diagramming user flows like this, and instead...
View ArticleReflections On Living In Data, by Jer Thorp
Earlier this summer, a group of us started meeting weekly to discuss Jer Thorp’s new book, Living In Data. The book is built on Jer’s experiences throughout his career as an acclaimed designer and data...
View ArticleVideo: How Developers Can Contribute to the Ethical Tech Paradigm Shift
Fasten your seatbelts! Because while many of us were raised during a generation of “click-it-or-ticket” public awareness campaigns, the true story of how seat belts became a fixture in American...
View ArticlePodcast: Into the Unknown Unknowns: Observability with Charity Majors
The speed of development and change in software engineering enables exponential growth and innovation. It can also give rise to ever-increasing complexity and the creation of systems that are as...
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Start Your Software Development Career through Apprenticeship
Ever thought about a career in software development but didn’t know where to start? Eager to test your skills and immerse yourself in a holistic bootcamp experience? At 8th Light, we’re excited to...
View ArticleBuilt to Last: Naomi Dennis Develops a Brighter Future through Software
A little over a year into her career as a software developer, New York City-based Naomi Dennis felt herself longing for projects that placed a higher priority on the quality and longevity of her work....
View ArticleVideo: Managing Dependencies on the Front End
Modern front-end development is a cornucopia of options and architectural strategies. A development team must survey the landscape and assemble a bespoke toolchain from the countless libraries,...
View ArticleVideo: Understanding Queuing Theory and Software Performance
What do McDonald’s drive-thru lines, highway on-ramp metering lights, and stadium beer service all have in common with software? They’re all bound to the same laws of queuing theory. In this talk, 8th...
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4 Questions on How to Have a Successful Software Career
As we look back on 2021, embracing the good, the awkward, and the new normal of this past year, we’ve been reflecting on what it means to work as a software crafter. Software craft can mean something...
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Web3, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain
The disruptive potential and explosive growth of programmable blockchains have fueled both optimism and cynicism alike. Optimists see an evolution of the read/write Web 2.0 that decentralizes ownership...
View ArticleResponding to the Log4Shell Vulnerability
Over the last week, cybersecurity experts and developers around the world have scrambled to understand and mitigate a frightening zero-day vulnerability in a popular Java library. The scope and...
View ArticleVideo: How to Write in React by Starting with Dependency Injection
React is gaining popularity because it’s so easy to work with. As a declarative language, it works like a factory for building UI components — you tell the system what to do and it figures out how to...
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Growing a Community: How Nicole Carpenter Helps the Software Developer Community
If you’ve attended an 8th Light University (8LU) in the last 5 years, you probably already know Nicole Carpenter. She spends her days helping one of 8th Light’s oldest clients modernize their massive...
View ArticleVideo: How to Build Video Games With Rust
Rust is one of Stack Overflow’s most loved languages, but the hype cycle of new programming languages has rarely resonated with video game developers. Although more traditional application developers...
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8th Light Awarded 2022 Best Places To Work Awards in Chicago, Austin and Los...
Built In today announced that 8th Light was honored in its 2022 Best Places To Work Awards, totalling five designations. The annual awards program includes companies of all sizes, from startups to...
View ArticleLooking Forward to 2022
As we enter a new year, it’s time to sharpen our No. 2 pencils and plan the year to come. And we’re excited to hit the ground running. Although we continue to improve and refine the ways our...
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