8TH WAVEMEDIA
8th Wave Media LLC · Utah

Software businesses,
built and run.

Six of them, live today. Each one takes noisy raw data and returns the one number a person can act on.

PORTFOLIO · LIVE METRICS 6 PRODUCTS · ALL DEPLOYED

Each product reads its own headline metric — they are not comparable to one another, but every number is real and you can verify it by opening the product.

Select a channel above to open it.

How we build

Most software companies keep their engineering standards private. We publish ours, because how a thing was built is most of what it is worth.

Verify, don't assert

Nothing ships on the claim that it works. Every product has a regression suite that runs before deploy. USLakeFront has 152 checks across five gates.

We learned this the hard way: eighteen documented bugs shipped or nearly shipped, and every single one returned a successful HTTP status. A green response is not proof.

Publish nothing rather than something wrong

When we cannot source a number honestly, we show nothing and explain why.

A lake page once displayed a neighbouring lake's water level — real, live, and from the wrong body of water. The fix cut our coverage from roughly a hundred lakes to thirty-one. We shipped the smaller number.

Public data before paid data

We check whether a federal agency already publishes it before paying anyone.

Water levels, shoreline boundaries, elevation, and state geography all come from USGS, EPA, and Census — free, unlicensed, and largely unused in the markets we enter.

Own the infrastructure

One server we control. No platform that can change its pricing or terms underneath us.

Five products, one machine, deployed and monitored with tooling we wrote.

Document the failures

Our own mistakes are written down where they can be read, including on the products.

USLakeFront has a page listing what is measured, what is modelled, what is a sample, and which bugs we shipped. In a market where the incumbent lists a horse property as lakefront, that is a competitive advantage.

Infrastructure

One server, six services, no platform dependency.

ServerVultr VPS · Ubuntu 24.04 · 300 GB
Webnginx · Let's Encrypt TLS on every domain
ApplicationsPython · Flask · gunicorn · systemd
DataPostgreSQL · SQLite · Redis
SourcesUSGS · EPA · USACE · U.S. Census · Wikimedia Commons
PracticeGit on every project · automated backups · regression suites
Open line

Acquisition, licensing, partnership,
or a question about how one of them works.

info@8thwavemedia.com