Working at 8th Light, we have the daily privilege of collaborating with truly brilliant minds—people who bridge the gap between deep engineering and meaningful human connection. We are also incredibly fortunate to work alongside folks who, no matter how tough the problem or early the hour, are overflowing with honesty, curiosity, and of course, the jokes. That’s why it brings us immense joy to announce our latest Beacon Award recipient at 8th Light, Drake Fish! The Beacon Award is a peer-nominated honor celebrating the individuals who bring 8th Light’s values to life and elevate everyone…
The MissionWe recently partnered with a startup that had developed a clinically proven approach to alleviating neuroplastic chronic pain. Their program worked: a coach-led model that helped patients ease chronic pain at a lower cost than conventional treatment. The problem was reach. The in-person model could not scale to the demand they were seeing, and there were not enough coaches to close the gap. We were brought in to build a digital platform that could deliver the program to every patient who needed it.Our Development Philosophy and InspirationAt 8th Light, we approach agentic…
Congratulations to Kevin Buchanan, our latest Beacon Award recipient, a peer-nominated honor that celebrates the people who bring our values to life and light the way for others to follow. Kevin, Principal Engineer, has been an 8th Light for over 12 years. A long-time favorite of our clients and his peers, he has a reputation for raising the bar on whatever he touches, and those who work alongside him come away sharper and stronger for the experience. Kevin's nomination came out of a year-long re-platforming effort for a long-time client. As AI reshaped what software teams could do, the…
8th Light's Head of Agentic AI, Travis Frisinger, and I spent two days in San Francisco at LangChain Interrupt 2026 watching what happens when agent demos meet production traffic. The room was full of companies that have crossed that line, and a few that wish they hadn't tried.The conversation a year ago was "can agents work?" The conversation in May was "how do we operate reliable, observable, governable agent systems at scale?" In the discussions we had at the conference, we validated that the shift was real and not just product marketing.What follows is what stood out across the two days,…
Why This Matters in the Era of Agentic EverythingThe gap between a Jira ticket and the first pull request (PR) is often a graveyard of productivity. Context switching, boilerplate setup, and requirement analysis can eat up hours of a senior engineer's day before they write a single line of business logic.Recently, industry leaders have showcased "Harness Engineering" [1][2] — the practice of building autonomous agent workflows that handle end-to-end coding tasks. While their results are inspiring, the barrier to entry can feel insurmountable.The challenge for most teams is finding a starting…
The Gap is RealIf your accessibility process ends with a passing scan, your users with disabilities are likely encountering barriers you do not know about.Automated tools are useful. LLM-assisted auditing has raised the ceiling. Neither closes the gap between what a tool can verify and what a person actually experiences when navigating with a screen reader. The gap is real, it is measurable, and it has organizational consequences.I have spent years running every category of automated accessibility tool the industry has produced: rule-based scanners like axe-core and WAVE, visual analyzers…
At 8th Light, we help healthcare organizations design and build AI-enabled systems that put people first, combining product strategy, human-centered design, and technology leadership to create innovative solutions that work for clinicians as well as patients. Why This MattersAlthough AI continues to dominate healthtech headlines, many frontline clinicians are still battling clunky systems, fragmented workflows, and administrative overload. The reality? Healthcare practitioners are not asking for more technology, they’re asking for more time with patients.The tension between innovation and…
Navigating ChangeThe way we interact with software is shifting. Instead of clicking through web interfaces and learning different UIs for each system, some people are moving toward natural language as the interface - telling an AI what they want done, and it handles the task completion for them. This shift is happening now, but there's been a missing piece: how does the AI actually connect to and control those systems? MCP DefinedMCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol that gives AI models a standardised interface to external tools and data sources. Think of it as a USB-C for AI -…
The 8th Light Beacon Award is an honor that recognizes distinguished individuals or teams who bring 8th Light’s values to the frontlines, inspiring and enabling the way for others to follow in their footsteps.As we closed out 2025, we recognized a team that carried 8th Light’s values beyond our screens and onto a global stage. Team Nimrods made up of Kelsey Roy (Senior Crafter), Jonathan Manahan (Crafter), and Eric Olson (Principal Crafter), represented 8th Light through their participation in an O’Reilly Architectural Kata— a hands-on, team-based workshop where engineers from some of the…
This technology platform, called 'Just Walk Out', required over 1,000 workers in India manually reviewing video footage to verify transactions. By 2022, 700 out of every 1,000 sales needed human review. Amazon pulled the technology from their Fresh grocery stores in 2024. They paved the way. But it wasn't sustainable.The problem wasn't the concept. It was the complexity. Grocery stores carry thousands of SKUs, items without barcodes, and unpredictable customer behavior at scale. In fact, this same technology is succeeding in stadiums and small-format stores. Mashgin kiosks are deployed across…
Digital transformation always sounds clear in an RFP or slide deck, but in practice things can get fuzzy fast. What exactly are we transforming? Is this about customers, or about ourselves? Are we reshaping workflows, or the entire business model? Without answers to these questions, projects stall, swirl, or never quite get started in the first place. As a Certified Sense-MakerTM and fuzziness connoisseur, I love helping clients make sense of their digital transformation initiatives.* This includes helping them understand the bigger picture, what their plans will mean for business operations,…
This is Part 1 in our blog series on how the design process works alongside Agile methodology to produce results within an integrated team.Updated 2/5/2026. Originally published 2/2/2024 When it comes to developing new software, not every designer approaches the task the same way. While some use a design thinking approach, looking at the tasks from a user perspective, others use Agile methods, approaching it from an iterative project management standpoint. However, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. The most successful designers approach their tasks using design thinking which…
At Lumen Field, Amazon One runs across concessions, merch, and age-restricted gates. With over 69,000 fans per game, every second at checkout compounds. Fans hover their palm. Move through. No card. No PIN. No wallet.The Seattle Seahawks adopted it for a simple reason. Every moment spent waiting is a moment not watching, not buying, not coming back.Palm recognition solves the payment bottleneck. Amazon One has processed over 3 million transactions across all venues. But the real test is whether the surrounding infrastructure can handle what comes next. Why This Ripples Beyond…
It’s the mid-90s, it’s Sunday morning, and you’re about to set your VCRs to record on your NFL game of choiceYou’d capture everything, commercials, dead time, halftime filler, and hope the tape didn’t cut out in overtime. It was static. One-size-fits-all.Then TiVo arrived. That pause button changed the game. Suddenly, fans could freeze a field goal, run to grab game day food, and unpause just in time for the kick. Control entered the living room.Fast forward to NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube. Fans are now building their own broadcast in real time. The cultural shift is clear: live sports have…
Updated 1/16/2026. Originally published 12/10/2024As we talked about in Part 1 of this blog series, The Design Process and Agile Development: Part 1 — Design Is Collaborative, the design process provides teams with the opportunity to join forces, paving the way for an integrated team of user experience (UX) designers, product owners, and agile software development to create a successful product. So where do you begin? You have a new project and an integrated team. You know that success can be achieved in close collaboration between your team members, each representing deep expertise in…
What a difference a year makes.When Netflix secured WWE Raw, a three-hour weekly live broadcast with more than three decades of history, it marked a turning point. Raw is chaos in motion: fan-fueled, unpredictable, impossible to rehearse. And now Netflix has to make it flawless. More than a licensing play. It’s an engineering gauntlet. Pulling it off means delivering a resilient platform that can handle global, live-grade performance every single week. Raising the StakesLive streaming has, of course, been around for years. But the expectation that a global service can execute hours of live…
Congratulations to Pierce Edmiston and Hugh Sato, our latest recipients of 8th Light’s Beacon Award! Our Beacon Award recognizes team members who exemplify 8th Light's values and inspire us all.Pierce and Hugh represent two different strengths within 8th Light that come together to create meaningful, high-impact work for our clients.Pierce, Sr. Principal Engineer blends scientific rigor with technical and product leadership to turn complex research and modeling into stable, production-ready systems. While Hugh, Principal Designer, elevates that work through a human-centered design lens that…
"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."Joanna Maciejewska I'm sure you've seen this quote from Joanna Maciejewska all over social media; I'd bet some money that there are shops already selling t-shirts and mugs with it. Despite seeing it dozens of times, I never thought about it in the context of my day-to-day as a programmer! I, like the quote's author, was more focused on AI hijacking the "classical" creative work such as painting and writing, instead of helping us humans with the…
The Evolution of Craft: How I Embraced AI in Software DevelopmentOne Sunday morning after a church service I was enjoying a cup of tea, cake and warm conversations with fellow parishioners. One of the conversations with a particular individual shifted to work and I learned that he works in the energy sector. More specifically, he is an engineering manager for an organization specializing in renewables where he oversees a number of solar arrays and other supporting infrastructure crucial for operational efficiency.He told me he was actively recruiting to in-source the development of their…
How to make your customers happy and your engineers even happierIt’s common for monitoring and alerting solutions on production services to be quite chatty, sometimes producing hundreds of notifications per day. There’s a scene in the classic film The Matrix where one of the characters (Cypher) is looking at a screen with green unintelligible code. He’s asked:“Do you always look at it encoded?”He responds by telling Neo he doesn’t see code, just what it represents.After some time in The Matrix like Cypher, in the sea of notifications you understand what they mean and know what is important.…
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