Ben Derham
Software Engineer. Helping teams solve tricky problems. Will stop to pat your dog.
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Are your AI agents making progress or producing work?
We shipped a working MVP for the Tech Council of Australia in two weeks using an agentic development workflow. Along the way, we learned how easily agents can produce convincing work without moving a product forward, and why engineers still need to decide what progress looks like.
·5 min readarticle
Is Your Design System Ready for AI?
AI can generate convincing interfaces, but it struggles when a design system’s decisions live in team knowledge rather than its components, documentation and defaults. Preparing a design system for AI means making those decisions discoverable, explicit and verifiable.
·6 min readarticle
Optimise Your Context, Not Your Prompts
AI makes better engineering decisions when it can understand a project’s architecture, conventions and shared knowledge. Making that context clear and discoverable helps it produce software that fits the wider system.
·5 min readarticle
Why Great Engineering Still Wins
AI can write code faster than ever, but coding was never the hardest part. The organisations seeing the biggest gains are investing in engineering fundamentals that help both people and AI make better decisions.
·3 min readthinkmill method
Activity Mapping
Activity mapping is a way to dynamically capture, and work on, product requirements in a format that’s more useful than a static document.
thinkmill method
Core concepts
Core concepts are an expression of a project‘s underlying data model and relationships, translated into a written format that the team can build an aligned understanding on.
thinkmill method
DACI
Created by Atlassian – DACI is a framework that helps delivery teams make effective and efficient group decisions.
thinkmill method
Mock API
Mock APIs imitate a real API by providing a realistic mock data response upon request. It’s useful during development and testing when live data is either unavailable or unreliable
thinkmill method
Process mapping
Process mapping surfaces the movement of information and user interaction throughout a system in the form of a flowchart. It captures assumptions or current-state realities related to how the system works, and helps expedite alignment, design, and development,
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Progressive Web Apps (PWAs): A stepping stone towards a native mobile application
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are now a viable option for providing a mobile experience that meets users’ high expectations. This article provides an introduction to the history of PWAs for those new to the topic, as well as what can be expected from them in 2024. We also look at where PWAs sit in the mobile landscape and how they can be a practical stepping stone towards a native application experience in the future.
·11 min readarticle
Storybook and Mock APIs: A Powerful Prototyping Combo
No back-end? No worries! In this tutorial we’ll be using Storybook and a Mock API to create a mocked prototype so we can get on with keeping our stakeholders excited.
·12 min readarticle
What we learned applying the Thinkmill Method to a complex accounting app
We recently wrapped up delivery of a feature for a client’s complex accounting app. The project presented a valuable opportunity to battle-test our thinking around how we build products. We implemented a range of activities and techniques from the Thinkmill Method, and came away with valuable insights related to where it shines, what’s needed in order for it to do so, and how to improve it going forward. Here‘s what we learned along the way.
·7 min readarticle
Visualising a schema-led approach using FigJam
Thinkmill uses a schema-led approach to design, which involves building visual representations of data structures to help teams understand the underlying relationships and dependencies. Recently, we used the Schema Nodes FigJam Widget to visualise the schema and relationships.
·2 min readarticle
A day out at DDD Perth 2022
Highlights from Perth’s annual inclusive conference for the tech community.
·5 min read
More posts from other Thinkmill voices
AI search explained: indexing, retrieval and reranking
Organisational knowledge is usually spread across a dozen tools, and keyword search only finds results that match exact words. We run text search, embedding search and reranking on the same dataset, and find out how semantic search with a reranker returns the most relevant results for a query.
·12 min readYour agent believes that docs folder
The agent trusted a committed docs folder of generated artefacts over my instructions. I deleted the lot and lost nothing.
·8 min readWhat AI use looks like in five enterprise design teams
Listening to design teams at Stripe, Shopify, Ramp, Atlassian, and Intercom, three ingredients become clear: a place to prototype, good context, and someone helping people put both to use.
·9 min read
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