About us

We met in 2016 while working together in the city of Hilversum. A professional connection quickly turned into a friendship, and over time, we discovered that our values and ways of thinking about technology aligned.

That same year, we were first introduced to DevOps principles. Although we came from backgrounds in Linux system administration and functional application management, we felt a natural fit working closely with software engineering teams. This is where we first started using technologies like public cloud, Kubernetes, and CI/CD tools. We also explored early self-service tooling, including the now-archived Deis Workflow project.

In 2018, our careers took different paths, but our friendship remained. Nick focused on growing his technical skills in Linux system administration, learning tools like Ansible, and supporting software teams in delivering applications to VM-based environments. Mitch dove deeper into public cloud, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code with Terraform and Terragrunt, and modern CI/CD tooling.

In 2019, Mitch became a freelance IT consultant, focusing on building self-service platforms such as public cloud landing zones and multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters for companies of various sizes. Not long after, we reunited on a shared project where we built a new self-service platform together, combining a public cloud landing zone, a Kubernetes-based developer platform, and a full observability stack. Mitch served as the platform architect, while Nick took on the role of Head of Tech, leading an IT organization of more than 150 engineers.

During these projects, we became increasingly interested in the theory behind effective software delivery. We drew insights from books like Accelerate, Team Topologies, and Flow Engineering, and realized that the work we had been doing for years aligned with what is now widely known as Platform Engineering. We continued to be inspired by industry leaders like Dave Farley, Kent Beck, and Gregor Hohpe.

In 2024, we saw the opportunity to take everything we had learned and turn it into something bigger. We started Evil8 to help organizations solve their platform engineering and software delivery challenges.