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Below is our recent interview with Paul Pagel, CEO at 8th Light:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to 8th Light?
A: 8th Light is a software consultancy dedicated to delivering high quality software products and helping teams continue to grow to reach their delivery potential. We have a human-centered approach to software focused on enabling small, disciplined teams to achieve big goals. We use mentorship, leading by example, and well-crafted software to build productive partnerships and help us create an impact.
Q: Can you give us insights into your services?
A: We deliver a few different software solutions that have been tested and proven to help power our clients’ business performance:
●We build full-scale products, from design to delivery to DevOps and maintenance. From enterprise products to entrepreneurial startup applications, we use the same disciplines to ensure success.
●We have a design, research, and UX team who builds empathetic, high-quality interfaces and interactions with users.
●We have a training department called Weirich Institute of Software, which uses apprenticeship and classroom training together to create a path of technical leadership in organizations.
●We have a consulting team who will embed with and train existing software teams to provide more capacity and help them grow with new ideas and ways of working.
●We have another team who focuses on bringing quality practices to emerging technologies, like data engineering and blockchain.
●We have a software managed services team that will take on entire software ecosystems for our clients and provide top tier software talent to make sure it stays healthy and grows with the businesses.
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Q: What does it mean to be a software crafter?
A: A software crafter is someone who cares about the quality of what we build. In software in particular, we think something is quality if it is stable, while also being flexible to adapt and serve a business’ different use cases.
Over the last 12 years, we’ve repeatedly seen that the best way to guarantee these qualities is by following agile and principled delivery processes. We train our team to master these processes through our unique internal apprenticeship program, and we frequently work on-site alongside our clients to help implement these same processes within their teams and within their code.
The term “crafter” is a nod toward the long history of apprenticeship, and it is also an acknowledgement that we treat software as an end in itself. We understand that a client’s users aren’t the only ones who interact with our code; their developers, designers, project managers, and stakeholders will be maintaining and updating the application long into the future. For that reason, we make sure to share our knowledge and write our software in such a way that it’s easy for our clients to continue delivering software and growing their business long after our engagement is over.
Q: What is the Weirich Institute of Software?
A: Weirich Institute of Software is an education program we developed to help software developers expand their knowledge and grow in their careers. It’s named after the late Jim Weirich, who was a regular speaker at conferences and developed a lot of tools to help people learn the Ruby programming language. He was a real inspiration to us as someone genuinely interested in helping others learn and grow as developers.
We created the program based on feedback we heard from developers working for our clients, the training programs we’ve led with clients, and our learnings from our own apprenticeship program. While code schools and other educational resources have popped up all over to help individuals start a career in software development, there was a big knowledge gap in applying that knowledge to big, real-world systems that people use. Right now, the Weirich Institute of Software partners with our clients to help their junior developers overcome this gap through more advanced training.
We think partnering with companies offers some advantages to us and our students. We believe that employer-sponsored education is an essential component to a long and successful career, and we’re happy to help other developers and employers realize this potential.
Q: As software developers, you’re often given access to various pieces of sensitive information in order to do your job. How do you handle that information in a secure way?
A: We employ a number of strategies to help secure our customers’ information. Ideally, we can avoid accessing sensitive data altogether—the Principle of Least Privilege helps in a lot of cases where our clients manage their production infrastructures themselves. You’re absolutely right though: we do often need access to confidential information to do our jobs.
Therefore, we have a number of steps we take, from locking down laptops with disk encryption, firewalls, and software updates, to specific tools like password managers and encrypted messaging, to taking advantage of the physical and software security features of cloud providers like AWS.
But, ultimately, our most important line of defense is our people. We’re all about learning as a company, and security is no exception. Whether it’s through one of our formal training programs or the ongoing sharing of leading practices across all of our teams and clients, the more we learn about security and propagate that mindset, the better we’re able to mitigate risk for our customers.
Q: What’s next for 8th Light? Do you have plans to grow, expand or diversify?
A: We will continue to grow as long as we are helping software products and teams grow themselves. We have expanded aggressively, both in creating new services, as well as new locations that support our core competencies. As a professional services company, it is always hard to predict what is next. We have so many innovative team members, and being employee-owned gives us the space to support their innovations as additions to the organization.
All our expansion is also diversifying our business. Once again, being employee-owned, we have a longer time horizon than other capital structures. This means we need to plan for the resiliency needed to operate a business for a long time horizon.
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Q: What is 8th Light doing to promote diversity and inclusion in the greater software coding community?
A: We have a group of employees who are passionate about diversity and inclusion and started a committee to focus on these topics. They’ve shifted thinking across the organization about diversity, from an afterthought to an integral part of how we think and plan, and we now ensure we have multiple voices represented when planning new programs and initiatives.
We hired a Chief Talent Office last year, and she’s done an amazing job of filling in some of the gaps in our culture and policies to make sure we’re truly inclusive, and measuring and rewarding job performance in ways that actually reflect our values.
We hold ourselves accountable to living inclusively by being an employee-owned company. Any employee can, in effect, become our CEO’s boss. All owners have access to detailed financials, and input to the board, which can influence the company’s direction.
We’ve also hosted and participated in a number of industry events focusing on communities that are underrepresented in technology. This outreach has resulted in a number of ongoing relationships and hires.
This approach is consistent with the way we work with software. We want to try out different things internally, make sure we understand what is working and why it’s working, and then take those learnings outward to our clients
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